The Future Perfect blog chases down what it might mean once we use our faces online:
One of the reoccurring conversations in the US that I coming back to is near-time facial recognition in the palm of the hand and how the face is increasingly… used as a gateway to our online identity/ies.
…Any country with sufficient resources will want to have control over which facial recognition searchers link to which faces (to protect their agents in the field). Today China issues licenses to companies that wish to offer location based services, expect to see a similar model adopted for consumer facing facial recognition based services.
Technically facial recognition is/will only be play small role of figuring who we are: the places we check-into; the transactions we make; where we are, with whom; other people nearby tagging us; other biometric data; the sensors we carry, can all be mined in real time. But it’s the face, and facial recognition – the most personal and comprehendible part of our human identity that we currently think of as our own, that we will take personally.
[via LN]