Conspiracy theories are born of concepts like this.  Riya Photo Search is a photo-sharing website similar in nature to Flickr, SmugMug and Picturetrail, but with a twist.  That twist is Riya’s software that performs facial recognition of the subjects in your photos.  It works like this: you upload your images to Riya, go through those images and select the faces of people in them and associate names with those faces.  Riya will then allow you to search your photo collection (as well as other’s publicly shared photos) for images that match who you’re looking for.  Looking for that picture of Aunt Sally?  As long as you have tagged a prior photo of her, Riya will pick out every photo that she is in.  The software is also capable of text recognition so searching for street and business names becomes a reality.  Riya’s beta phase starts soon and they are taking applications for people who want to give the service a try.  Neat concept, but very creepy. We have hung with a few of the Riya peeps (like Tara Hunt) in the past - their team is damn cool.

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