If the face fits...

GEORGE Orwell got it half-right in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We are being watched, but not by a single Big Brother. By an army of them.

GEORGE Orwell got it half-right in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We are being watched, but not by a single Big Brother. By an army of them.

Look at the ongoing fuss over Facebook's new facial-recognition software, which can identify people in newly uploaded photos. It's a handy tool that streamlines your experience of the website, right? Well, yes. But it also enables Facebook to harvest yet another piece of information about each of its 500 million users. Information that it stores on vast databases, because it's useful, it's valuable.

Facebook is just one of thousands of "points of contact" in our everyday lives where details about ourselves and our habits are being observed, collected and stored. Dr Gavin Smith, who leads the newly established Surveillance & Everyday Life Research Group at the University of Sydney, says: "People don't realise the extent, the ubiquity of this surveillance. It's embedded in the technological infrastructure of our society."

From internet "cookies" which track your web-browsing, to social media sites and the hundreds of forms and applications you fill out every year, it's all grist for the mill. Even your store "loyalty card" is part of the game (it's not really about corporate friendship; it's about finding out who you are and what you buy - pure gold for marketers).

One of the key issues Dr Smith's new group will look at is how those databases are transferred between organisations, aggregated, analysed with sophisticated algorithms - then used against us.

The ability to identify individuals by referencing facial images held in such databases is emerging as a vital part of this big picture. And facial recognition software is already finding clever new applications. A New York tech firm called Immersive Labs is pioneering a digital billboard that detects the type of person passing by, and changes accordingly (a beer advert if it's a young bloke, for instance; a perfume if it's a woman).

But left unchecked, where will facial recognition technology take us? Imagine if a stranger could walk up to you in the street, snap a photo of your face with a smartphone, and instantly read off your identity. A dystopian view of the future right? Actually, it's already technically feasible: Google has looked into it, but decided not to go ahead on ethical grounds. Executive chairman Eric Schmidt said such a development would "cross the creepy line".

Will other companies show the same restraint, though?