Instant facial recognition and detection, is it Science Fiction or Science Fact? Facial recognition and detection technology is getting 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.

Though computers still have difficulty identifying faces in low light or poor photo quality, programs are now able to capture a profile of a face, build a 3D model of it, rotate the photo and identify the person the face belongs to.

If a future in which you can always be identified really is around the corner, what will stop advertisers or even the government from putting names to previously anonymous faces of people walking into a store, strolling down the street or protesting a convention? That’s what the Federal Trade Commission sought to find out at a facial recognition policy conference in Washington last month.

The answer as of now: industry self-regulation. The Digital Signage Federation, a consortium of companies operating digital signs that detect or recognize faces, developed privacy guidelines that require consumers to “opt-in” to being detected or recognized. But that “opt-in” can be made as simply as walking into a store that posts on its window that it detects faces.

As of today, no laws or regulations specifically prevent your face from being detected or recognized without your consent. “Is U.S. privacy law ready for facial recognition? It’s not even close,” said Daniel Solove, professor at the George Washington University Law School.

The solution, however, isn’t easy. Warning people that a particular venue is equipped with face detection technology means the only way for people not to be detected would be to avoid the location. But what if it’s a drug store and someone needs to get a prescription filled?

More than 35,000 developers have built apps that have detected and recognized more than 35 billion photos using Face.com’s online software. They range from fun toys like Celebrity Findr, which scours Facebook and Twitter for photos of celebrities, to practical tools like Fareclock, which tracks when employees punch in and out by scanning their faces.

Somewhere in between is Find Your Facemate. Upload your photo and the service will find a potential future love interest who uses the service and looks like you.

How long will it be before someone decides to put together all these online images into a central database and in many online repositories like Facebook and Twitter, our name is already linked to the photo.

Face recognition and detection is real, but the government doesn’t yet have a way to protect its citizens from potential abuse of the technology. With the vast network of internet based security cameras recording much of our daily lives, this is just the next logical step. Are you ready for this? In the future, can anyone remain anonymous?

Over the last few days, Facebook users have been experiencing a flood of links, videos, and images depicting pornography, violence, and a myriad of unseemly images. Facebook confirmed the problem, in short, stating it was hit by a coordinated spam attack leveraging a browser vulnerability.

Some members of the social network are complaining about violent and/or pornographic pictures showing up in their News Feeds without their knowledge. Others are being told by their friends that they are sending requests to click on links to videos, sending out bogus chat messages, or writing mass messages and tagged photos leading people to believe they are in the link.

We’ve seen this type of spam on Facebook before, but it’s coming in at a much faster pace. According to the company, this spam attack all started with users being tricked into pasting and executing malicious JavaScript in their browser’s URL bar. Facebook says it has been shutting down the malicious pages and accounts that attempt to exploit this flaw and has been giving users guidance on how to protect themselves. Overall, the company claims it has managed to drastically reduce the rate of the attack, but didn’t elaborate with actual numbers.

“Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us, and we are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “Recently, we experienced a coordinated spam attack that exploited a browser vulnerability. Our efforts have drastically limited the damage caused by this attack, and we are now in the process of investigating to identify those responsible.”

“Our engineers have been working diligently on this self-XSS vulnerability in the browser. We’ve built enforcement mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious Pages and accounts that attempt to exploit it. We have also been putting those affected through educational checkpoints so they know how to protect themselves. We’ve put in place backend measures to reduce the rate of these attacks and will continue to iterate on our defenses to find new ways to protect people.”

Users are outraged, and as is typical with Facebook members, many are already threatening to close their accounts. That being said, it’s still not known how many of the site’s 800 million active users are affected.

Think you may have a Facebook virus or your account has been hacked? Here are three things you should try: change your password, remove suspicious apps, and perform a virus scan.

Change your Facebook password

It’s possible your Facebook woes are coming from the result of a phishing scam. Someone may have created a fake website that looks like Facebook or another online service you visit and tricked you into logging in. Their goal was to steal your password and other account credentials, and they may have succeeded.

In this case, you should change your password on Facebook. :

If changing your password fixes your Facebook problems, you should change your password for all your other services too, especially if you use the same password for them as you previously used on Facebook. If this doesn’t fix the problem, try the next step.

Remove unwanted Facebook apps

It’s possible your Facebook problems are coming from a rogue app that you accidentally installed or were tricked into installing. Every Facebook app has certain permissions to your account. Some of these permissions you can modify, while others you cannot.

Your best bet is to remove all the Facebook apps you find suspicious. If you don’t know how to do so, there are guides on Facebook itself.

If cleaning out your apps fixes your Facebook problems, tell your friends they should do the same (chances are the app asked your friends to install it as well). If this doesn’t fix the problem, try the next step.

Get some security software and run a virus scan

It’s possible the problems are coming from some sort of malware, be it a keylogger, a trojan, or some other type of virus. Even if you think your computer is clean, it can’t hurt to check.

I recommend Microsoft Security Essentials –it’s free and gets the job done very well. Another good one is Malwarebytes. Other free alternatives include Avira and Avast.

The aforementioned security programs are for Windows. If you have a Mac, try using the antivirus from Sophos.

After running the virus scan, clean out whatever the program detects.