You know those Craigslist missed connections posts? The ones where you’re looking across the subway platform at someone, and you wish you could get their number, but you can’t really shout across the tracks?

Well, I was in New York City this weekend and I had a sudden inspiration. There’s a (hypothetical) solution to the “missed connections” problem. And it’s sitting around in plain sight.

Here’s how it works. Many of you are probably aware that Facebook has been steadily developing its facial recognition algorithm. It’s quite good at this point. It can scan any of your photos and tag you automatically, if you’ve enabled the feature. That means Facebook’s algorithm can recognize your unique face. It stands to reason, therefore, that Facebook’s algorithm could scan any photo from any of its 800 million members, and recognize you if you’re in it.

So, let’s take that one logical step further. Imagine you take a photo of someone and upload it to Facebook’s servers. Facebook can analyze the photo and tag that person’s face.

I bet you see where I’m going with this.

You’re back on the subway platform — you see someone across the way. You raise your phone and snap a quick picture via the Facebook app. The train comes. While you’re pulling away, the app has displayed that person’s profile. You click “friend.”

And just like that, missed connections are a thing of the past.

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Interesting, eh? Also, creepy. Obviously, if Facebook enabled this feature it would cause a firestorm of privacy concerns. But Facebook hasn’t exactly shown much concern for privacy in the past. And everyone does have a public profile, anyway… and subways are public areas. Given that the tech exists right now, I bet we’ll see this within a couple years.

The implications are rather large.

Dan