Scary Search Engine Lets You Search By Face
Ladies: if you thought random dudes sending you marriage proposals laced with spelling mistakes and little-to-no grammar on MySpace was freaky, just wait until mugr.com takes off -- the creepy quotient promises to be off the scales.
Mugr is essentially a "face-based" search engine, linked to its own social-networking site (and offered to others through an API), connects images of people's faces to information about their identity.
Want an example? Say a dude is at Trader Joe's and sees you shopping for asparagus, but can't muster the cojones to actually step his game up and say something to you. So what does he do? He takes your picture on his cell phone, uploads the shot to MUGR, and gets a message back telling him who you are. Creepy enough for you?
The folks at Mugr have an answer to the obvious privacy questions: "The technology that powers mugr.com is not so terribly different as that possessed by many governments and law enforcement agencies. As such, there is no reason that the public should not have the ability to do what it will with such technology. In the end, the technology at mugr.com is only frightening if its users make it so."
Yeah, um...they will. Let the anarchy begin (in a few years, at least, when the thing actually works. Maybe).
From Rough Trade
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