Wide-spread criticism has compelled internet search giant Google to review its plans to launch controversial facial recognition technology.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that wide-spread opposition of its new technologies amid concerns over privacy has forced the management team to review them. Facial recognition technology is one of the important topics being reviewed by the management team.

Facial recognition technology, which is already being used by Google in its Picasa photo sharing service, allows users to tag some of the people in their photos and then to make searches for similar pictures in other albums.

Google recently became the center of privacy storm after it admitted that it used wireless networks to gather people’s personal information.

The personal information was gathered by Google’s Street View cars which were meant to collect people’s network names and addresses through WiFi networks. Google did not declare what information it collected from WiFi networks, but reports suggest personal information could have included e-mails, addresses or websites people were viewing.

But, Mr. Schmidt argued that that pictures plus other personal information shared on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter could be more detrimental than the information it gathers via its search engine.