This is the first thing that's made me want to get off Facebook...and the Internet.

What if someone could point a camera at you and instantly know your name, social security number, and penchant for Farmville? That'd be creepy, right? And invasive? I certainly think so.

But surely, you say, such a thing is the suff of science fiction. Bad news: IT'S NOT. It's the stuff of reality today.  It might be time to panic.

As I discovered in this story (and this one), researchers at Carnegie Mellon have recently combined "an off-the-shelf face recognizer, cloud computing and publicly available information from social network sites — to identify individuals online and offline in the physical world" BY THEIR FACE.  As this article explains, "Since these technologies are also accessible by end-users, the results foreshadow a future when we all may be recognizable on the street — not just by friends or government agencies using sophisticated devices, but by anyone with a smartphone and Internet connection."  All someone has to do is point a camera at your mug and take a picture.

Lest you think this is just an academic exercise, here's a brief description of what the Carnegie Mellon team did with their technology:

In one experiment, Acquisti's team identified individuals on a popular online dating site where members protect their privacy through pseudonyms. In a second experiment, they identified students walking on campus — based on their profile photos on Facebook. In a third experiment, the research team predicted personal interests and, in some cases, even the Social Security numbers of the students, beginning with only a photo of their faces. (Source)

More info here.

I am, to put it mildly, quite disturbed.  We are way closer to a bleak dystopian future than I ever suspected.

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Fun fact: The Blogger spell checker doesn't recognize the word "dystopian."  It suggests I may have meant "dyspepsia," "Fallopian," "Dionysian" or "Bostonian."  I think I need to get a doom-themed add-on for this thing.