Not too long ago, digital vigilantes in the UK formed a group to help authorities identify London rioters and put together a facial recognition app. Their initial claim of being able to match images taken during the riot with Facebook photos with reasonable accuracy caused an upheaval among the media because it’s a possible turnkey to forge ahead the identification of the delinquents while at the same time an aperture that could grow into a black hole of privacy concerns as it violates European and German data protection law.

However, the app did not prove itself very passable that ultimately led the group to abandon the project. The app is so bad it matches people who aren’t even part of the riot with claims of 50 percent accuracy. The app uses Face.com’s facial recognition technology which the group initially tested on 30 friends to see if any of them were participants of the recent riot.

“Bear in mind the amount of time and money that people like Facebook, Google, and governments have put into work on facial recognition compared to a few guys playing around with some code,” says the group leader who wished not to have his name revealed. “Without serious time and money we would never be able to come up with a decent facial recognition system.”

Anyway, Scotland Yard says they are developing facial recognition technology in preparation for the 2012 Olympics which the country will be hosting. Better leave the development project to people who have the resources to actually develop a viable one. The UK police, meanwhile, decided to leverage crowd-sourcing and community assistance through uploading CCTV camera pictures to their Flickr account for the public to help them identify possible suspects. The Greater Manchester authorities even went as far as humiliating the muggers by tweeting their names and birth dates, as well as displaying mug shots on their website. Also, there’s this rioter who robbed the wrong geek and pilfered a Mac installed with a cyber-Lojack. Unknown to the burglar, the owner received photos of him via the laptop’s camera as well as his activity on the computer. The laptop was eventually retrieved.

Face.com has gained a traction good enough to raise itself $4.3 million in a round of funding led by Rhodium. The money will be used to boost their development team, hire some new and talented people, and build out additional infrastructure to support their facial recognition platform.