Or track individuals with facial recognition; my understanding is that Facebook's facial recognition algorithm is very accurate, not sure where Google's tech is in this regard.
Eric Schmidt said a while back that they have the technology and is probably pretty accurate, but they want to avoid building a facial recognition database.
I've heard from people working on Facebook's stuff is that it's hilariously inaccurate if it has to choose between more than about 20-30 people. Most of the work is spent on figuring out which if your friends is likely in the photo.
If you wanted to solve the "identify person on street" problem, you'd probably have to augment it with things like scans of NFC enabled credit cards and phone MAC addresses to know who is in the area -- not an entirely impossible set of sensors to put in a self-driving-car.
OT here, but I've used Picasa's facial recognition extensively on a very large library of photos (about 50,000). Anecdotally, I would say it started out very good, but, strangely, it got much worse over time.
Part or all of this effect may have been due to UI bugs or deficiencies that didn't clearly show what it was really trying to tell me (does it really think this is a new person, or separate for some other reason?), or didn't allow for subtle variations on what I was trying to tell it (such as "no, but good guess", or "this looks nothing like the person, but actually is")[1].
I can only guess why this is, but at first it seemed to be quite good at finding new faces that looked very similar to the ones it had found so far. Over time, it's as if the wide variety of confirmed positives reduced the confidence in finding any new faces at all.
[1]: It was somewhat confusing whether I should select and move a bunch of wrong faces to the right person, or just say no and let it try again. It might have also helped if I'd been able to say "yes these are all the same person, but I don't want to name them in my database".
Imagine googling a license plate and finding 1) where it was last seen by a google car (perhaps just a few minutes ago), and 2) a picture of the car and its occupants.
Of course, no reason to stop there, might as well throw in some facial recognition around all those folks you're passing on the sidewalks.
(Don't get me wrong. I'm both excited and optimistic about self-driving cars. The privacy concerns and having Google collect yet more data about the universe? Not so much.)
"The privacy concerns and having Google collect yet more data about the universe? Not so much."
Why? As far as I'm aware, they haven't been snooping into people's private data. Nor have they been explicitly selling it to any third party. And the haven't been abusing the data we have given them.
Now, don't get me wrong, they have most certainly been monetizing that data. But that's a different story.
Are you simply just scared of what Google will store/infer about you?
You are responding to a charge I never made. I said I had privacy concerns, not that they were snooping into data, selling it to third parties, or abusing the data we gave them (not that we would all ever agree on what "abuse" meant, or ever know what might happen to all of our data in the foreseeable future)
No, you misunderstand what I was saying/askin. I asked "Why?" And then I proceeded to enumerate all the reasons I could think of that would lead a reasonable person to have "privacy concerns" about Google. And I also said that they did none of those.
Agreed. Abuse wouldn't be even very feasible to define, let alone get the majority of people to agree on.
