Earlier this week, Facebook announced a set of new facial recognition tools which, if turned on, notify people when someone posts a photo of them that they haven’t been tagged in, as long as the individual is part of the audience of the post.
The new feature will also notify people if they appear as someone else’s profile picture. It is aimed at helping people manage identities online to prevent impersonation.
According to Rob Sherman, Facebook’s Deputy Chief Privacy Officer, “If you think about the way photo sharing works traditionally on the Internet, if someone posts a photo of you, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to see it”.
The tools also include a feature to help visually impaired persons more easily identify images seen on the social network by reading aloud people’s names, even if they aren’t tagged. The feature builds on the “automatic alt-text tool” Facebook launched two years ago, which describes objects and activities in photos to users with screen readers.
“Our technology analyzes the pixels in photos you’re already tagged in and generates a string of numbers we call a template, when photos and videos are uploaded to our systems, we compare those images to the template”, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Facebook’s head of Applied Machine Learning, said in a blog post on Tuesday.
Although the feature would be optional as Facebook has designed a new “on/off” switch to allow people control if Facebook should recognize their face in photos and videos, and if users receive alerts about photos they’re in across Facebook, it would only recognize pictures moving forward, not those uploaded in the past.
The feature would be available globally, except in Canada and the European Union, where regulators have rejected the technology.
Other major technological companies to recently incorporate facial recognition more deeply into its product are Apple and Google.
- Apple: the latest iPhone allows people use facial recognition instead of a fingerprint to unlock their phone.
- Both Apple and Google offer photo sorting services that use image recognition and faces to organize collections.
