The shadier side of vision

Engineers and programmers sometimes get too enamored with technical details (whose heart doesn't beat a little faster with thoughts of eigenvalues?), and neglect the social and ethical aspects of technology.

Computer vision is probably one of the worst areas to ignore social and ethical aspects.  There are some beneficial applications of computer vision, like physical rehabilitation, detecting seizures, etc., and a lot of highly shady applications (though most applications of computer vision would probably fall under informational or entertainment categories - like bird classification and fancy visual effects on photographs).

Here's an interesting website from a person opposing the use of face detection in social networking sites. http://cvdazzle.com/