[ruby_roo]

Not bad, but I think it would be more useful if I could submit an image and have the engine give me all the facts it could dig up about it, based on its context in other pages, geo tags and camera type (if available), etc.

I think we're going to see some very interesting developments along these lines very soon. Scary stuff too. Imagine submitting a picture of yourself and finding out what the internet knows about you based on your physical appearance. Better keep those Facebook profiles private, folks! More than that, you'll have to convince your friends to keep their profiles private if they have pics of you as well!

<tangent> This is what is rather frightening about the next web; even if you want to remain anonymous, you're going to have to do battle with all the other folks who are more than happy to post and tag pictures of you for the world to see (with good -natured intentions, I might add). Remember that embarrassing moment at that party where you had a little too much to drink? Oh, you were too drunk to recall? Well, it's on somebody's public Facebook profile now. With your name on it. And if I am your employer, what's to stop me from taking your badge photo and plugging it into a service to pull down other pictures of you from the cloud? :O </tangent>

Anyway, back to the matter at hand! I do see your service as being particularly valuable to IP holders who want to know who is displaying their copyrighted images or logos without authorization. If your site were comprehensive enough, you could probably go freemium and become a paid tattle-tale. Take that a step further and "For a nominal fee, you can click here to have our partners at LegalZoom.com send a takedown notice."

:)

[wave]

You can use http://imageheader.com/alpha , which reads image file and displays all information about the image including geolocation tags. This is alpha version

Example:

http://imageheader.com/alpha/index.php?url=http://farm4.stat...

[FlorinAndrei]

Privacy is dead, move on.

[froo]

Imagine submitting a picture of yourself and finding out what the internet knows about you based on your physical appearance.

Actually I think this sort of technology would be just as useful for the dating sites to help weed out potential fake profiles.

[blasdel]

You can "untag" yourself from other people's facebook photos.

[thwarted]

Aka "opt-out". Which is why privacy is dead: who's going to be able to keep up with that, especially when other people have no problem tagging you if you know about the picture or not.

[blasdel]

When they tag you in a picture you get a notification -- it's how someone implicitly 'tells you' about a picture they have of you.

[thwarted]

Assuming you're on the system they are doing the tagging on (it's easy when it's just Facebook, but a photo could be tagged on Flickr with your real name and you'd never know), and you check your email (or whatever method of notification they provide), and a host of other things that put more work on those who are trying to control their exposure. That's the problem with opt-out, and that's why thinking you can maintain your privacy by monitoring what other people do is folly.

[blasdel]

If the image tag on Facebook isn't linked to your profile, there's no way for anyone to find it, unless they were friends with the poster and browsed to the photo.

Flickr is more public, but they don't do any user-graph linking at all, the photo annotations are plain text. I don't think the annotations are even exposed to google.

[cousin_it]

Go outside, photograph random girls with phone camera, find their personal details with tineye, approach and start conversations. Fuck Yeah!

[sutro]

Old-school, low-tech, real-time, in-person approach: "Hi. How's it going?"

Your TinEye approach, later that day, via email: "Hi. How's it going? You don't know me, but I surreptitiously took your photo in the park earlier today, uploaded it to a reverse image search engine, and eventually uncovered your personal data after an exhaustive web search. Care to get some coffee sometime?"

Why don't you A/B test these two approaches to find out which works best?

[cousin_it]

Why "later that day", don't you have internet access from the phone? :-) I agree the old skool approach would work better for me, but the high-tech one is still a boon for stalkers and such.