For better or worse, facial recognition has become the technological elephant in the room. It’s there, but nobody really likes to talk about it too much. Despite the continued advancements of software and algorithms that would elicit gasps of awe in some of the other tech sectors, the ever-improving ability for machines to put a name to human faces is considered, in most cases, unwelcome.

Take Facebook’s recent unveiling of its DeepFace research paper for example. The algorithm, which is a still seemingly long way from being integrated into consumer-facing element of the social network, uses 3D analysis of human faces to identify them with a 97.25 per cent success rate.

The human brain only can do a fractionally better job with 97.5 per cent. As incredible as that breakthrough appears to be, you’ll struggle to find reports that don’t contain words like “creepy,” “scary,” or “stalkerish,” just like the verdicts on Facebook’s previous iterations of identifying tech, that have been protested in some countries and banned in plenty of others.

Meanwhile, Google is busy worrying about the overwhelmingly negative perception of facial recognition tech in this post-Snowden surveillance society. It has banned such Google Glass apps, fearing a backlash that could seriously derail the pending acceptance of its headset.

Despite that, we stand on the precipice of a coming out party for the technology. Facial recognition has been simmering beneath the surface, reticent, and also unwilling to show its real face to the world, but now it is almost ready to emerge. […]