The Future: Can you remain anonymous?

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(CNN Money) By David Goldman - Face recognition and detection technology is becoming cheaper, faster, and much more commonplace, raising the question of whether people will be able to remain anonymous in the near future.

Digital signs and sensors that detect and recognize faces are no longer a matter of science fiction. They are real and are popping up everywhere from malls to bars to smartphones.

So what's protecting you from Big Brother tracking your movements and invading your privacy? As of right now, technology is the only significant barrier.

Today, the technology is not quite robust enough to snap a photo of someone on the street and instantly know who they are. Computer processors aren't fast enough to scan across billions of images in real time to match an offline face to an online photograph. But that's coming soon.

"To match two photos of people in the United States in real time would take four hours," said Alessandro Acquisti, professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College. "That's too long to do in real time. But assuming a steady improvement in cloud computing time, we can soon get much closer to that reality than many of us believed."

Acquisti and his research team at Carnegie Mellon have already developed a proof-of-concept iPhone application that can snap a photo of a person and within seconds display their name, date of birth and social security number.

Currently, the reference photos have to be uploaded to a database, but Acquisti said that processing speeds will soon become fast enough to do the whole process online and in an instant.

Since 1993, the false positive rate for identifying faces has been halved every two years, reaching 0.003% by the end of last year, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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