Another new SmartPhone app out there that is getting mixed reviews….
Picture this…
You are walking your dog at a local park on a Saturday morning, minding your own business and waiting for your dog to do their business. All of a sudden a weirdo with a comb-over hair-do approaches you. He drops his slick pick-up line on you similar to the Rupert Holmes Pina Colada song.
“If you like Piña Coladas, getting caught in the rain
If you’re not into yoga, if you have half a brain
If you like making love at midnight in the dunes on the cape
I’m the love that you’ve looked for write to me and escape”
So what do you do? Scream? Walk a little faster? Sic your dog on this nut job? Think to yourself why is he targeting me?
Then he opens his mouth and starts to converse, and it’s freaky, simply uncanny all the things Mr. Suave Creepster has in common with you. Suddenly you realize, he is all but plagiarizing that profile you put on PlentyOfFish.com last month in the hopes of meeting Mr. Right. He knows that you don’t smoke, that you have 3 children, your hometown, the city in which you reside, what your profession is, and that you go to this park frequently with your dog, almost daily, weather permitting
Putting the “stalk” in stalker, NameTag is a new facial recognition app for Smartphones which will allow a user to scan a crowd and pinpoint people with profiles on online dating sites or social media sites. The app, designed for Android and iOS, scans a person in whom the user is interested and looks for that person on dating sites such as PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, and Match as well as social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
NameTag wirelessly sends the photo that the user has surreptitiously taken of the prospective date to a server, where it is then compared to millions of records. In seconds, a match is returned that has the unwitting victim’s full name, additional photos and all social media profiles.
With this App known as NameTag, Your Photo Shares You.
Why should you leave meeting interesting people up to chance? Don’t miss out on the opportunity to connect with others who share your passions.
Connect your info and interests with the world by simply sharing your most unique feature – your face. NameTag links your face to a single, unified online presence that includes your contact information, social media profiles, interests, hobbies and passions and anything else you want to share with the world.
Using the NameTag smartphone or Google Glass app, simply snap a pic of someone you want to connect with and see their entire public online presence in one place.
The app encourages you to register yourself so that anyone on the street can instantly know everything about you. Now tell me, really, who in their right mind would think that this is a good idea?
Here’s Jane, NameTag’s example profile holder.
Get to know Jane – by using NameTag
Jane has lots of different social media profiles and loves to meet new people. By using NameTag, she can link all her Social Networks to her face and share her information and meet new people in an instant. At work, she opts to have just her Professional Profile information visible, but when she goes out to happy hour with her friends, she changes her profile settings to Personal and displays more details, like her hobbies, interests and relationship status.
Bad idea, Jane. There’s a pervy dude that just took your picture and is now salivating thinking about your single self in your yoga pants doing yoga.
The techy folks think that this is just great.
NameTag’s creator Kevin Alan Tussy said:
I believe that this will make online dating and offline social interactions much safer and give us a far better understanding of the people around us. It’s much easier to meet interesting new people when we can simply look at someone, see their Facebook, review their LinkedIn page or maybe even see their dating site profile. Often we were interacting with people blindly or not interacting at all. NameTag can change all that.
The app doesn’t stop at accessing dating profiles and Facebook accounts. Oh no! Just like a Ginsu knife commercial, wait, there’s more! If you order right now, you’ll get this great bonus!
For added peace of mind, the user can also cross-reference the photos against more than 450,000 entries in the National Sex Offender Registry and other criminal databases. So this app is going to take ONE PICTURE and tell you that someone is in a criminal data base?
This is not a state-of-the-art facial recognition program. What if it’s wrong?
This will definitely not be an app on my phone. Would it be something you would use?
It had to happen I suppose. There’s a niche for everything and a buck or two to be made.
You ask the question ‘Would you use it?’ (sic) Not surprisingly, many people would, probably.
Handy weapon for a creepy stalker. Nasty too.
I’m with you Marc. There are many valuable smartphone apps out there but this is not something I would use. Different strokes for different folks.