Since Google Glass first appeared, its potential for facial recognition has been seen either as a privacy nightmare or as one of the headset’s first truly intriguing uses. Google has declared itself in the first camp. Stephen Balaban is in the second, and he’s about to share his vision with Glassheads everywhere, whether Google likes it or not.

At the Chaos Communications Congress hacker conference in Hamburg later this month, 24-year-old Balaban and his startup Lambda Labs plan to release an unauthorized app for Glass that allows users to collect and catalog images of faces seen through its lens, along with other recognizable objects ranging from computer screens to license plates.

The app, which Balaban is calling FaceRec, will give Glass-wearers the ability to integrate that data with location coordinates to create a map of who or what the user saw when and where. And on Friday, Lambda Labs will also begin taking pre-orders for an Android-based, Glass-like device it’s calling the the Lambda Hat, a $255 camera-enabled cap designed to be even better suited for that always-on computer vision.

“As you collect data over time, you can start to ask questions like, who was that person I talked to during the last month at the Rosewood?” Balaban says. “Give it a geolocation, and you can find all the pictures and timestamps at that location, and it will show you all the people you saw.”

Lambda’s app, to be clear, isn’t meant for wide adoption – YET […]