Best subjects for civil services.

Do the Terms and Conditions for photo-sharing services address the use of facial recognition to identify photo subjects?

• A mundane example - a marketing agency goes on Foursquare, grabs a bunch of pictures people took of a crowded bar, identifies the people in the photos by their faces and then starts spamming their social media accounts with ads for liquor.  Do the terms of photo sharing services prevent this?  Does google's "search by image" feature prevent somebody from matching a random snapshot of you back to a social network account (for the purposes of spamming, or spying or whatever).

• Answer:

  You are inventing capabilities where none exist. But because this is not (yet) possible, T&C's don't prevent the use of their images in this way. Google Image search matches exact images with others on the net. It doesn't match faces or people. It isn't capable of facial recognition. It might match a snapshot that the searcher acquired from some source with that exact same snapshot on a social network, but most social network images are private, not public. Facebook, for instance, only requires that your profile pic be public. The default is for all other pics posted to be Friends only. Google Image search doesn't use FB photos at all anyway. Your scenario in which photos are taken from Foursquare and then facial recognition software is used to identify these people and match those identities to specific social network accounts requires a facial recognition database. None exist on the level you are talking about. Besides, FB doesn't allow spamming of accounts through messages and you can only post on the walls of people that are your friends. "Spamming" is currently only done through ads or by posts that reach those that have "Liked" your business page. Also, photo sharing services (as opposed to social networks) don't normally have names attached to the faces in the photos. So I'm not sure how you find this a useful source of data in the first place. Your real question should probably be: Can a social network, like Facebook, be turned into a facial recognition database for all of its users? I'm pretty sure the answer is currently "no".