Google denies it's adding facial recognition to Goggles

INTERNET AND SOFTWARE GIANT Google has denied that it is adding facial recognition to its Google Goggles smartphone app, saying it needs to address privacy concerns first.

CNN reported that the company was working on a facial recognition application, citing comments from Hartmut Neven, director of image recognition engineering at Google. Google has denied that it has any current plans to implement such a feature.

A spokesperson for the company told V3.co.uk that it "will not add facial recognition to Goggles unless we have strong privacy protections in place," adding that this has been the public stance of the company for over a year. Google said it is "still working" on those privacy protections and has nothing to announce about them at present.

This denial does not rule out that Google is actually working on the technology behind the scenes, even if it wants to address privacy concerns before releasing it. Neven was quoted by CNN as saying "technically, we can pretty much do all of these things". He said that Google has to be "way more conservative", however.

Goggles allows users to take images on their phone and let Google do an automatic image search. It can be used to identify paintings, look up books by their cover, get more information on landmarks, and translate foreign language menus, among other things. Facial recognition, if and when it finally does arrive, will add a whole new dimension to the application. µ