San Francisco, CA - Scenetap's anonymous "facial detection" app receives raging negative criticisms from various bar-hoppers. The new technology scans the faces of bar-goers to determine the venue's current 'scene'. This was initially rolled out in 25 local bars in 6 cities including Chicago and Austin.The head of developer SceneTap, Cole Harper, has responded the criticisms. "Nothing that we do is collecting personal information,” he said. “It's not recorded, it's not streamed, it's not individualized.”
SceneTap claims to have already tracked over 8.5 million people.
Sources: zdnet, news.com.au , t3.com, the official site of scenetap
Comments:
Since there is a realtime overview especially the percentage of women in the bar or club venue, this gives a better picture of the possible prey-men and women but most of the time it would be the ladies who becomes the prey or target. If someone wants to have a higher chance of meeting a lady then all you have to do is to check the statistics. The greater the number of ladies and the lower number of men or other competitors, the greater the chance of hitting a target.
This could also be an invasion to privacy. Come to think of this, in mid 90's if someone captures a picture and brings it to a local government agency, it would be hard to get details of that person's identity. But now due to the advance technology if you have a photo and you give it to a local crime investigators, they can use that photo and have it compared to an existing database of images and find a match which is exactly the same idea of what Scenetap has applied in their algorithm. If the figure above is true then Scenetap has millions of pictures that equates to millions of stolen identities which can be distributed anytime in exchange of MONEY. I mean in the business world, money matters. Because of consumerism, Scenetap could earn a multi-million dollar business from these images in the future.
I am not against this but what I am afraid of is the potential abuse of this technology.
