Do you still remember the time when you watched a sci-fi movie and the bad guys were caught because of facial recognition?  Remember thinking how cool it would be if that ever became a reality?  Well the technology is here now, but security and privacy issues are also accompanying its progress.  Honestly, would you really want the world updated of your activities based on an auto-tagging feature?

Facebook was bombarded with security and privacy concerns when they launched their facial recognition feature for Photos, which aimed to make tagging easier.  Facebook is now addressing these issues through a series of ads that will aide users in customizing their privacy settings and their availability for tagging, a tactic that’s becoming par for the course with any major Facebook update.

“The company has been cooperative and diligent in its response and I look forward to working with them in the future to make sure Facebook users’ privacy is protected, which I believe is our shared goal,” Attorney General George Jepsen said in a statement.

“Our collaboration with Attorney General Jepsen means that people across the country using Facebook will be more aware of our personalized privacy settings, and how they can be used to benefit their experience on the site,” Tim Sparapani, director of public policy at Facebook, said in a statement. “The Attorney General has been an effective partner on this project, and we hope that people on Facebook will find the results to be helpful and useful.”

Apple is also embracing facial recognition as rumors fly around that the next iOS 5 may have such a feature.  With last year’s acquisition of Polar Rose, a company that specializes in facial recognition, the next iOS may be where they will integrate that technology as it has never been deeply incorporated into their iOS yet.  Polar Rose’s technology of photo editing had been available for years for Windows users, and since the acquisition, that technology is slowing creeping up to Apple users.

And while Google’s Eric Schmidt is a bit creeped out by the technology himself, his company has already embraced facial recognition feature in Picasa, and furthered by their PittPatt acquisition.  It seems as if Google is following Facebook’s footsteps in the use of facial recognition for photo tagging for Google+, but there are still no official announcement as to how PittPatt will fit into the company without raising any privacy and security concerns.

“We’ve said that we won’t add face recognition to our apps or product features unless we have strong privacy protections in place, and that’s still the case,” a Google spokesperson said.

Honestly, facial recognition will be helpful in terms of apprehending and identifying criminals but with it being incorporated to everything else, it is kind of disturbing.  The automation of it all seems to press on growing privacy concerns about the information we’ve been thoughtlessly putting online all these years.