Facebook to Offer Face Recognition for Photo Tagging
source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-magid/facebook-to-offer-face-re_b_797413.html
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Just a few hours after Time magazine anointed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg "Person of the Year," Zuckerberg's company announced yet another new service that will attempt to recognize pictures of your friends based on their facial characteristics.
Starting next week, Facebook will start using face recognition technology to assist its users in tagging pictures of friends.
**** Privacy Remains the Same ****
Facebook officials told me that the new service will not change the privacy settings related to tagging -- users will still get a notice if they are tagged and can remove the tag of any photos. Also, users continue to have control over who tags them.
Another comforting fact about the new tagging service is that it's not automatic. When you upload an album, Facebook will attempt to recognize the people in it. If it finds what it thinks is a match it will ask you to confirm. If you do nothing, the photo won't be tagged.
As has long been the case with photos, you will only be able to tag people you are friends with and, presumably to improve accuracy, Facebook will only compare the pictures against a relatively small sub-set of your friends -- perhaps as few as the 30 people you communicate with most often, which, according to computer scientists who study face recognition, can improve the accuracy.
Facebook will also be allowing users to opt-out of having their name suggested to friends during the photo tagging process. If you disable "Suggest photos of me to friends," your name will "no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually," according to the Facebook blog.
From a privacy standpoint this move should have little impact but it is yet one more example of how Facebook is encouraging people to share information, including photos.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-magid/facebook-to-offer-face-re_b_797413.htm...
Starting next week, Facebook will start using face recognition technology to assist its users in tagging pictures of friends.
**** Privacy Remains the Same ****
Facebook officials told me that the new service will not change the privacy settings related to tagging -- users will still get a notice if they are tagged and can remove the tag of any photos. Also, users continue to have control over who tags them.
Another comforting fact about the new tagging service is that it's not automatic. When you upload an album, Facebook will attempt to recognize the people in it. If it finds what it thinks is a match it will ask you to confirm. If you do nothing, the photo won't be tagged.
As has long been the case with photos, you will only be able to tag people you are friends with and, presumably to improve accuracy, Facebook will only compare the pictures against a relatively small sub-set of your friends -- perhaps as few as the 30 people you communicate with most often, which, according to computer scientists who study face recognition, can improve the accuracy.
Facebook will also be allowing users to opt-out of having their name suggested to friends during the photo tagging process. If you disable "Suggest photos of me to friends," your name will "no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually," according to the Facebook blog.
From a privacy standpoint this move should have little impact but it is yet one more example of how Facebook is encouraging people to share information, including photos.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-magid/facebook-to-offer-face-re_b_797413.htm...
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- groups:
- Tech, Technology
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- tags:
- Technology, Service, Tagging, recognition
