A short conversational transcript in which Robert Scoble and another speaker discuss real-time face-recognition/detection technology, its availability (e.g., Face.com), and likely deployment via wearables (Google). They contrast startups (e.g., Highlight, Face.com) that can ship opt-in features with large companies (Google, Facebook) constrained by user expectations and potential government regulation. Privacy concerns and public reaction ("freak out") are central.
So in real time I can figure out who people are, what makes them tick and how they fit together, you know, which a lot of people don't think of doing that when they meet people. They just say, oh, that's a cool guy or fun person to hang out with. They don't think of turning away and Googling them and figuring out who they are, what they do, you know, and find them on Facebook or find them on Twitter and subscribe to them and start, and start seeing what they're doing. I'm doing that in real time. That's why I'm really looking forward to these wearable computers coming from Google Next year. The Google project last. That puts a computer screen right here and it will let me do those Google searches in real time. It'll be very interesting.
Yeah, not by thought, but we'll have some face recognition in future.
Unclear because that gets into governmental regulation. They certainly can do it. The technology is done. Face.com, which is an Israeli company, has face detection. It works. I've seen it work. It's been on my iPhone. It works. It only works for France. They del. Limit it. They limit it to not freak people out. The database is there. I went to Facebook and they said, we have a billion people's photos. We can do face detection, no problem. The problem is the governments would freak out and people would freak out.
Freak out.
Yeah. Right. People would freak out and governments therefore would freak out and cause regulations to happen. And so they both Google and Facebook told me they are going to be very careful with that kind of technology because they don't. They can't afford to have the government regulating their businesses.
I don't know. You never know what they do with their data in the background.
I think it's going to be a startup.
That's who ignores all these.
No, it's going to be a startup. And like Highlight for instance. Highlight's a great, great example. This little startup, when you start it up, you know what you're getting it. It shows you other people who are using Highlight within a hundred yards and it shows you their Facebook likes that are in common with you and the Facebook friends that are in common with you. It's, it's great. I love it. I have 2800 people I've already met there. Wonderful tool. But it's, it's completely opt in. Everybody knows what it's for, you know, and so if you say that's intrusive, well, you've joined it. So stop joining that. Right. Where Google and Facebook have had other use cases and if they try to add this new use case on it freaks people out because they weren't expecting Google to surface their information that way even though Google has it. For instance, Google knows every search you've made and it stored that in a database somewhere. Most people don't think about that because they've never surfaced it. I can't go somewhere and look at all your Google searches, right? But there is a database somewhere that has all of your Google searches stored by you. In fact, you can look at your own history, right? If you turn that on. But they can't surface it. They can't change the expectation of what the product was. And a startup doesn't have that problem. So a startup can come along like face.com and say, hey, we're going to do face detection and it'll be opt in.
Okay?
People will join it. I'll join it. I'll join it the minute it's out, right?
