One of my friends often says Google is the new God. It knows everything and what it does not know, it is working very heard to find out. However, the trend is now changing to Facebook.

In past few months, almost every one of Facebook’s applications has raised issues of privacy and how safe it is for people to use it. And almost every debate ends with the fact that there are people who oppose it and there are people who are all for it.

Chris Mejaski (centre-left), Tim Inman (centre-right) and other pairs of Facebook look-alikes.

The latest one is finding your look-alike on Facebook. The application uses the same technology used by security agencies; however it just puts the same fact more nicely, saying “you’ll be able to find a person that looks just like you.”

The disclaimer is how you use this application is “up to you.”

Experts are obviously not too happy with this application. University of Toronto’s Professor Andrew Clement researches online privacy and did not feel comfortable using the application.

Why?

He says “I’m not sure that it’s harmless.”  “Once you’ve allowed it, it looks like it’s too late. There’s no indication of your privacy rights, whether you can pull out if you don’t like it.”

In spite of the privacy issues, more than 200,000 people have already signed up and found their look-alikes. Most of them are not looking to find their childhood lost twins or any such matter, but the photos are remarkably similar.

Professor Clement points to another hazard of the application: “all the matches on the Facebook application point to a flaw in larger databases. People do look like each other, which can create hassles if you have the misfortune of sharing facial features with a criminal.”

“If one of your doubles comes afoul of the law, and they (government or police) use facial recognition software on your face, that other person is very likely to come up,” he says. “It shows a match without it being a match. This is a very big problem for large-scale databases.”

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