The next time you walk into a Seven-Eleven store to purchase a can of soda, or go into a high-end boutique to check out the seasonal sales rack, watch out, you might be on camera-and these images captured on the camera can do more than you think.

The latest marketing tool that advertisers are starting to use is called Facial Recognition Technology. Basically, your face has become a link between your online and offline presence. A simple high-resolution image of your face is digitized and compared to billions of other images on the Internet to be used to link other information about you by the marketer. By linking your image with the various popular social media services such as Facebook, Tech30, etc, information about you, your friends, your interests, the stores you visited, and the purchases you made, among many other things, are available to the marketers. This aids the marketing company to be able to target products, services, and additional advertisements that are tailored to your interests and spending habits.

Companies such as RedPepper, FaceFirst and Intel are putting facial recognition technology in stores and restaurants. The technology even offers real time features that report potential shoplifters or high-yield customers. Highly sophisticated algorithms can analyze your past buying patterns and create a customer profile, enabling the sales staff to know more about you before even saying “Hello.” Some services require a customer’s permission first, but some companies do not.

In this world where technology advancement is a necessity and the trend is that it is growing as quickly as imagination, there are always challenges that come with it. There is an obvious privacy concern. We can change our credit card and password, but we cannot readily change our face. With the widespread and unregulated use of facial recognition technology, I can see this invasion of privacy will leave people vulnerable to unwarranted exposure, unfair profiling, and even social harassment.