Discussing online privacy is all the rage at the moment, largely driven by Facebook’s Open Graph and instant personalisation double-whammy, and exacerbated by security leaks in launch partners. Straightforward security bugs aside, it’s hard to disagree with some of Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas that sharing personal info online is becoming more, not less, acceptable to the majority of users. How far they’re willing to share is another matter, of course, and it’s yet to be seen whether Foursquare or Facebook’s upcoming location product will gain mainstream acceptance.

All of this could be dwarfed by something such as the pervasive photo recognition that face.com may soon be able to offer. The video demo below shows how powerful it could be to take a photo of an individual and pull up the user’s details on any number of social networks.

Whether I want to check-in to Foursquare or not, it’s not too far away from being able to have me checked in by anybody at all, whether they’re connected to me personally or not. Although there’ll doubtless be regulatory issues, the idea that users could completely lose control of their own privacy is a huge leap on from Facebook’s fairly innocuous “some of the things you put on the web might be seen by other people” policies. Face.com has recently introduced an API so anybody can build their own face recognition app.

And this morning I found SnapScounts, a superbly compact spoof on it all. It’s the perfect combination of game mechanics and privacy invasion:

Want to earn tons of cool badges and prizes while competing with you friends to see who can be the best American? Download the SnapScouts app for your Android phone (iPhone app coming soon) and get started patrolling your neighborhood.

It’s up to you to keep America safe! If you see something suspicious, Snap it! If you see someone who doesn’t belong, Snap it! Not sure if someone or something is suspicious? Snap it anyway!