It shouldn’t be surprising that advances in technology often outrun society’s ability to adapt to them. A good example is public records laws. When many public records laws were originally passed, searching through public records was difficult and time consuming. You (or someone you hired) had to go down to the courthouse and manually read through tons of documents. This effectively meant that public documents were really only available to people with a lot of time (or money, to pay for someone else’s time).

When those records were put online and indexed by search engines, the information contained in them became easily accessible to everyone. Want to know what your neighbor paid for this house? Google it. Want to know when your boss got married? Google it. Once people realized how public public records were, the amount of information made available was reduced to protect people’s privacy. In principle, that information had always been available; in practice, it was only made available in a usable format after it was indexed.

In fact, search engines have made it much easier to find all sorts of information about a person. Before Google, when you met someone at a convention, you couldn’t find out much about them afterwards unless they chose to share their personal contact info. Now, you could plug in the info from their badge into Google and (usually) find a wealth of info about them. Fanime has about 10,000 attendees; if only .1% of them are stalkers, that’s ten stalkers walking around Fanime.

However, right now, there is a good way to protect against this — don’t put a real name or any Internet aliases on your badge. For conventions that always print a real name, black it out with a marker. Without a search term, text-based indexes are useless . Stalkers could take a picture and post it on various forums, but that is hit-or-miss, doesn’t scale, and alerts the target that someone is stalking them.

This is a good way to protect yourself for now, but what happens when you can search by photo? Facial recognition has been around for a while, but it has always required tremendous computing power and was somewhat unreliable, In last year or so, Google rolled out facial recognition in a limited fashion for Picasa. This means the technology is getting easier and cheaper to deploy. In the future, what if Google developed an image-based index? In other words, what if you could point Google at a picture and ask for more pictures of the same person?

If that happened, anyone who has pictures of themselves posted online could be found with one photo. If a stalker took one picture of my daughter at the mall, without even knowing her name they could find all my photos of her, and probably eventually find her address and other info.

Of course, eventually, society will adapt. Google text-search encouraged people to make their blogs “friends-only”  and reduced the amount of information in public records. Some people always restricted their blog, but it didn’t become the norm until people realized how much info about themselves could be found through Google. Likewise, once people realized the impact of search by photo, most people would probably restrict photo access to friends/family.  But just as it’s pretty much impossible to suppress all text info about yourself online, it will be impossible to suppress all photos of yourself online, and we will all lose a little more privacy.