Facial recognition of anyone has gone mainstream in Russia ¹, reports The Guardian. The FindFace app feeds all the data from a Russian social networking site through an advanced facial recognition algorithm and let’s anyone quickly and easily identify anyone else ². A big, big loss for privacy.

The founders see themselves just as a wheel in the ever-turning enhancement of technology:

But Kabakov said, as a philosophy graduate, he believes we cannot stop technological progress so must work with it and make sure it stays open and transparent. […]. A person should understand that in the modern world he is under the spotlight of technology. You just have to live with that.”

That’s a convenient view to avoid any moral questions about your work; it also ignores the fact, that, ultimately, technology does not create itself, but people are in charge of creating and adapting technoloy, and steering the economic, political and societal systems.

1. Confirming that large-scale facial recognition indeed isn’t far from facial detection. ↩

2. With a 70% success rate. ↩