One of the biggest debates surrounding the advancements of the digital age concerns the privacy of individuals. Some argue that privacy is no longer an issue for people with social media accounts – if you’re on social media you can’t expect privacy. As someone put it recently: “If Andy Warhol was alive today he’d say ‘Everyone wants 15 minutes of privacy’”.

The trouble for privacy advocates in the digital age is the sheer number of applications designed and launched every week that strip away our layers of confidentiality. Take The Astonishing Tribe’s latest app – Recognizer.

The user points their phone camera at a person’s face and face-recognition software creates a 3-D model of that person’s head, sends it to a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition and sends back the person’s name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to.

Privacy is dead, long live privacy.

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