Polar Rose, a new service on the Web, is nothing fancy. It is software that studies pictures of faces, determines their unique features, and then attempts to recognize whose faces are shown. This is nothing new, but Polar Rose claims to be more accurate than previously existing facial recognition technology and it’s been turned loose on all the pictures stored on the Web. Polar Rose issued a launch announcement promising that the online service will enable people to:

- Search for more photos of the same person on specific sites or across the whole Internet.
- Collectively add information and tag people in online photos.
- Automatically sort online photos by the people appearing in them.
- Be alerted when new photos matching visual search criteria appear.

If you put family photos on the Web (perhaps you post them on a picture-sharing service like Flickr), Polar Rose should be able to figure out the people in the photographs (the service is able to do this in part because its users collectively fine-tune the recognition and identify new faces).

Therefore, if you’re in the pictures you post, it will be possible for others to use the service in the future to identify you in other pictures. These may or may not be pictures you’ve decided to post. Perhaps it’s a picture of you at a political protest, or a visual record of your attendance at a party that you would prefer to be discreet about.