Remember the good ol’ days of the Commodore 64, back when fluorescent colors were fashionable and “Computer, earl grey…hot” was to boldly go where no one has gone before?

Well, those days are now behind us, and unless you’re one of the stubborn few who still use a phone line to dial into “those newfangled internets”, you have probably heard of Google’s new search by site application, “Google Goggles”.

On Monday, Google announced the launch of a new search engine that allows users to perform an internet search simply by submitting a photograph. Instead of using words, you can take a picture of an object with your camera phone: Google will attempt to recognize the object, and return relevant search results to you. The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what’s been uploaded. Vic Gondotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, has said: “It is our goal to be able to identify any image. It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query.” The application is still in a very early stage of development, however, and works best with objects, books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, and logos. You can view Google’s video of the application below:

What this author finds particularly chilling is the fact that this service has the potential to perform instant facial recognition. “Although the service can recognize faces, since faces are among the billions of images in the database, it doesn’t right now,” Gundotra told CNET.com. “For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition. We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place.”

Wait a second…I think I saw this movie! The legal and privacy ramifications of such an application are, well…eye boggling. Consider, for a moment, the amount of information people freely post on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. I had remarked in an earlier post that a fully filled-out Facebook profile contains over forty pieces of recognizably personal information, including name; birthday; educational and employment history; online and offline contact information; sex; sexual preference and relationship status; political and religious views; favorite movies, books and music, and of course, pictures. Facebook is the largest photo-sharing application on the web with more than fourteen million photos uploaded daily. Facebook further offers multiple tools for users to search out and add potential contacts. In completing a typical Facebook profile, a person will have created a comprehensive database of information about both who they are and who they know. This is, for the most part, information that our laws treat as highly private. Now consider that a stranger in a bar could simply snap your photograph and immediately tap into all of this information. Anonymity, privacy, would be a thing of the past: anyone could know everything about you with the click of a cell phone camera.

Indiscriminate advertising could also become a thing of the past. As you walk down the street, cameras could identify who you are, what brand of clothing you are wearing, what you have purchased, evaluate your online data, access your personal preferences and assess your internet browsing habits in order to project video ads that are specifically targeted at you. Of course, the type of customer service you receive might also depend on what the sales clerk reads about you as you walk into a store. We may have progressed well beyond 1980s technology, but in some respects, we could also be heading towards Orwell’s 1984; except that everyone is watching, not just Big Brother.

If you are interested in sampling a further taste of technology that is just around the around the corner, have a look at the clip below on “sixth sense” technology that is currently being developed by researchers at MIT – it is truly fascinating. (The beginning of the clip is a bit slow, so if you are in a hurry, forward the film to 2:30 where Pattie Maes starts to demonstrate the device.)