If someone wants to find you, they can. And that’s illustrated in a particularly Big-Brotherish manner by this video from DigInfo showing a surveillance system by Hitachi Kokusai Electric that can search through 36 MILLION FACES IN ONE SECOND. It monitors surveillance camera feeds in real time, looking for a match for a face you provide it from a photo or video. When it finds the face, it then zeroes in and gives you the video of what the subject’s been up to and where. It’s meant for use by large-scale operations like train stations or power plants (or law enforcement agencies) where they have lots of cameras in their surveillance systems, but it’s not a huge leap to imagine scaling this up to tie in to cameras around the world and allowing anyone to find anyone else in short order. It’s quite possible that government agencies have systems like this already, not that we’d know about it, but we’re getting closer and closer to a time when anyone will be able to access this kind of technology.

You can run, but you can’t hide. That’s both cool and scary.

HT: Popular Science