I have written, for almost 4 years now, about the integration of facial recognition technology onto Google. At various points Google has denied they are working on it, admitted they are working on it but are still getting the kinks out, and even acknowledged that they will do it.

Most recently, Eric Schmidt noted that Google “was” unlikely to introduce facial recognition technology.

Asked a question about coining the phrase “crossing the creepy line” to describe an aspect of how Google thinks about privacy, Mr Schmidt indicated that, for him, a database utilising facial recognition advances was “unlikely” to be a service that Google would create. He suggested “some company by the way is going to cross that line”.

Seems Google has been working on this for some time. On August 19, 2010, Google filed a patent, titled “Automatically Mining Person Models of Celebrities for Visual Search Applications.”

Omniveillance is nigh.

H/T Kash Hill