I love facebook.. well I don't love the code, nor the actual developers - but the ease at which I can communicate with my friends and keep up to date/stalk their current activities.  It's great to see how people are getting on with their busy lives without having to keep annoying them with phone calls.

No, that's not really the point.  Facebook is great for keeping in touch with people who you _want_ to keep in touch with.  I had a scarey thought today, and I'm sure I've read it on someone elses blog recently (so apologies for the obvious plagiarism) but I had to make myself clear.

Thus far, Facebook has been pretty bland about their privacy policy.  The whole of facebook was opened up to external search engines with an opt-out, rather than opt-in policy.  If this was an initial design decision, then sure, not an issue.. but thousands of people who had enjoyed the relative security now had their accounts blasted open.. not a great call.

Tonight, I had a look through some photos of myself - how very egotistic.  It's nice to look bad at the periods where I lost weight, where I gained weight, and when my hair colour became salmon, blue, green and most other colours you can think of.  However, this aforementioned scarey thought came across my mind.  There are some pretty good face-detectors out in the 'ether' at the moment, and there are plenty of photos (400+) of me on facebook, with the majority of them showing my face.  It's definately not outside the realms of possibility that these two factors should get merged.

GREAT! says I.  I don't have to worry about tagging my friends on their albums - as long as I'm friends with them I can run this software and it'll find out who is the closest match to the picture (given that silly faces could be harder to get accuracy on, and plenty of those appear on facebook) so I can confirm it and save myself the ten minute hassle of tagging.  However, due to the 'lax' security and privacy currently on facebook, what are the chance that the software could work out who I was for people that aren't my friends.  Were I to go out to a club, meet a few people, have some photos taken.  How difficult would it be for them to check out who I am by running a 'Facebook Facial Recognition Check.'  If they use the regional networks, then they have access to all my photos already - so it becomes quite a huge possibility that they'll be able to positively identify me.

It's a scarey thought.  I don't like it.