I blogged Riya's face recognition system (which works from photos) before its launch, and comments to that post and Riya's blog showed some concerns about the possible mis-use of the technology. Munjal Shah, Riya's founder, has responded: "Let me address how the Riya recognition system works and how its limitations make it very unlikely that we could use this for security or 'evil' applications." Basically:
It turns out that our algorithms work only because we are typically looking for 100-ish unique people in your albums. If we tried to look for 1 million unique people in your photos our accuracy rate is almost zero (more wrong than right). In fact most of the recognition you see on TV is pure fiction.
