It seems that everyone in the tech world is talking about Google Glass. While Google Glass is still in its infancy, a number of developers are developing for the project early. One of the companies developing for Google Glass is Lambda Labs, and the product that they’re developing is an API for facial recognition for Google Glass.
Lambda Labs is a very young startup based in San Francisco. They’re facial recognition API was released into beta last year and is already being used by over 1000 developers. But now that API has been tailored for Google Glass and should allow facial and object recognition for people using the glasses.
The technology will allow for a number of great features on Google Glass, even to the extent of having the ability to find people you know in a crowd of people.
While this technology sounds absolutely amazing, it is also a potential problem for privacy advocates. Despite this, the technology is not a complete breach of privacy because of the fact that it does not work in real time. You first have to take a photo of the person, send it to the servers of the developer and then get a notification back. This would all take at least several seconds. Despite this, new updates to the technology could make it work more automatically.
Google has already spoken on having facial recognition on Google Glass. When asked if it would have facial recognition, he replied with a firm no, unless of course strong privacy protections were in place. Despite this, there is nothing specific in Google’s policies against facial recognition, although that could change.
One work-around to privacy concerns could be to have people opt-in to the service, allowing their information to be accessed by people using facial recognition on their glasses.
If all goes according to plan, the API should be available to developers next week, and should prove to be a huge hit to those currently using Google Glass and those who are to use it in the future.
