Indeed, Google seems to have been so concerned by the technology that Schmidt declined to implement it even though his company already had the know-how to make it. "We built that technology and withheld it," Schmidt said. "People could use it in a very bad way."

Next: Off-the-Shelf Efforts, Watch Out for Little Brother, and more

You don't need the power of a government or an Internet behemoth to make facial recognition work for you. At this year's Black Hat security conference (held in Las Vegas in August), a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University demonstrated how much they could accomplish with existing off-the-shelf technology.

The team took photos of people's faces and pushed those images through an off-the-shelf facial recognition program called (which ). In the demonstration, in less than 3 seconds, the program compared the CMU researchers' photos to images publicly available on Facebook and returned 10 possible matches, along with the names of the matches. The process proved to be accurate more than 30 percent of the time.