With CRM, merchants try to understand shoppers as much as possible. In today’s social-media-oriented world, that goes far beyond a list of products purchased and website pages visited.

Snapchat this month was issued a patent on a way to identify a specific face amid a sea of billions of social media images. The official intent of the patent is privacy, as hard as it might be to imagine that Snapchat is truly interested in protecting anyone’s privacy. The privacy idea is that identified faces could be blurred or otherwise obscured if that person’s privacy settings indicated that desire. But does this face-identifying approach hold much greater promise used as a CRM, rather than a privacy, tool?

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