Will it ring a bell? Speaking of photos of people, MyHeritage.com claims that if you upload your mug it can be matched with a celebrity’s. Sounds like fun, right? After I was forced to register on their site (*ugh*) I started out by trying a half-dozen photos. None produced any accurate matches. I thought the pictures I uploaded were well-known celebrities, which means I’m either very unhip (they claim 3,200 celebrities in their database) or their Cognitec system is absolute proof of how unreliable this form of biometric identification is today (or both). Try it for yourself. Grab a photo of your favorite celebrity, upload it to the system and see if it can recognize them. If that doesn’t work, do you really trust this interface to manage your identity information?

Separated at birth?

Jeremy Piven was matched to Sugar Ray Leonard and Walt Disney. Who would have thought? And if you search their database, you find names like “Agam Rudberg“. Um, who? Is she the same person as Agam Rodberg? More data integrity worries from a system meant to make it less of a concern. I can only hope they do a good job with confidentiality.