If I can do it, so can they

Google’s Picasa is more advanced than a simple photo manager. There is a feature that can automatically pick out portraits of people based on facial recognition and then group them together. Even with photos in which the faces are quite small Picasa can parse them out for you to name.

See below:

This unassuming photo of pedestrians in a German town can be analyzed for faces and the following is generated:

This technology is surely already being implemented by security and espionage services worldwide – the only difference being the scale is much grander, with cameras in traffic lights and crowded streets that are surely checked against a database to try to find troublemakers in the system. See below for more examples:

And just remember, as time goes on this will only become more prevalent – and if you look up it will not be hard to imagine you will be recognized immediately.