Face-recognition has reached your smart phone, bringing science fiction closer and also (I expect) a storm of controversy.

Nametag, an upcoming app for Android, iOS, and Google Glass, will allow you to photograph strangers and find out who they are — complete with social networking and online dating profiles. Snap and send a pic to NameTag’s server, where it will compare the photo to millions of online records and return with a name, more photos, and social-media profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where the person (or their friends) might have publicly posted photos of themselves. In the U.S., Nametag will also match the photo against more than 450,000 entries in the National Sex Offender Registry and other criminal databases.

There is already some discussion of the blatant privacy concerns… and one can see why Google has banned this capability (officially) from its very cautious “Glass” endeavor in wearable augmented reality, preferring to let these frontiers be probed by smaller, expendable companies.

Still, expect a huge row over this, along with campaigns to outlaw face-recog on the streets.  As forecast in The Transparent Society (1997) this will be a nexus of confrontation between two very different approaches to preserving privacy and freedom, and you can be sure the “let’s all hide!” reflex will start to win, at first…

…until it becomes clear.  That the “let’s all hide!” approach simply won’t work.  And if it did, we would only empower our new masters.