Modern technology never ceases to surprise us. There was a time when if you knew a person’s name and his whereabouts you could find him online. But those days are over. Now if you have a picture of someone you can easily know his life history. Let’s be real, everyone has their social media presence. And people love to upload pictures of them on a regular basis. They post tons of pictures on Instagram. They post the pictures of our food, their dogs and most importantly their face. 

It was only a matter of time that people would cash on all this data. Some company made a library of all these online photos and pictures. It sounds scary and it is. Your right to privacy is not anymore maintained. The pictures you thought were private and shared only a couple of people are now saved in a volume of private libraries. If you uploaded an ugly picture of yours – back from the 90’s and it is saved in the photo library; if you have posted your cheerleader outfit on Facebook back in 2009, and later deleted it, it is still in the great dictionaries of photos. There are various data analysis tools available in the market that helps to analyse and examine these photos and extract beneficial information from them. 

The company stalking these images are gathering information from the third-party application such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and popular applications like Face app. This act does violate your right to privacy. They then trade these data to whoever seems fit. They might sell it big corporations or other countries such as China. They may for financial gain sale our pictures to anyone who would pay enough money to them. 

This is indeed a scary time for us to share anything on social media. Our every move is tracked and analysed to death to gain benefits. If you visit Starbucks and then your favourite park, Google will ask you how your outing was. They’ll ask you to rate the services that you received. This should baffle and alarm us. 

Here are a few ways corporations can benefit from Face Recognition software. 

• 1. They can identify theft easily. If there is a library of photos, all they need to do is to tap into that pool and the suspect’s picture with their information will pop up. This will help reduce the many crimes that are committed inside malls and other areas. The police already use this technology to catch their suspects.
• 2. People have cameras installed inside the malls. They can detect people’s faces. Now the company may put things strategically in the mall and see people react to them. They can assess do people like the item or not. If they do, do they try it out? Do they purchase the item? Is the price too high for the mass? These things are easily recorded and analysed, thanks to the new improved software technologies.
• 3. Review technology helps companies to provide better services. You can review almost any institutions and organisations with the click of a button. These reviews matter a lot when it comes to customer relationship build-up. This option somewhat gives power back into the hands of the consumers.

It is clear as day that the web portals will systematically exploit human data. It is up to individuals on how to access social media and other web portals. We must make sure that the information that is sensitive to us should not end up in social media.