Soon Your Phone Will Tell You: I See You!

Recently Rice University researchers developed the revolutionary system for remote image search through images, stored on people’s mobile phones. The main purpose of the program, called Theia, is to give the law enforcements almost real-time picture of what is going on via the pictures made by phone cameras which are stored at the cell phones.

And Not Only Your Phone

The best way to utilize such ability is to look for lost and abducted kids. There are thousands of mobile devices, cell phones and smartphones around the place where they were seen last time, so it is very likely that someone took a picture of the child, no matter accidently or not.

Theia works using server for the searching and app installed to the phones for pictures access. When the searching process finds the possible match on any cell phone, it uses the geo-location data of that phone to locate other mobile phones nearby. Then Theia looks through the photos on the nearest mobile devices to make the proof of the primary results.

Privacy What?

Yep, concerns. Theia simply cannot (as it was stated) access all your pictures without your permission. The system will access only those photos which you allowed it to access. So here is the question arises: who will grant the access to the private photos to this system ex gratia?

There is an opinion that it is probably great for people to be paid to allow Theia access their photos. But despite the money fact there is another side of the story. Those people who grant the access to their photos will also be the part of the passive spy network. Despite the social responsibility for people missing, especially children, it is quite dangerous, especially if consider the frequent facts of call phone app hacking.

So it is up to you to decide whether to participate in the Theia program or not. But remember, if you are willing to protect you mobile device and yourself from being spied through the photos from your camera, use mobile phone signal jammers. And you will not be shown on the pictures of other people surrounding you.