New Facebook Tool Uses Facial Recognition Software
Facebook to use face recognition software
Last Wednesday the social networking site Facebook announced on its blog that the company will be improving their popular photo-tagging feature by utilising facial recognition software to suggest photo-tags to users.
The new feature is intended to eventually replace manual tagging; a change that Facebook believes will be welcomed. The company suggests that many users find the process of tagging whole albums arduous and time-consuming. With automatic facial recognition and tagging suggestions, the days of trawling through countless images and manually tagging every face in them could be a thing of the past.
The new software works by automatically searching a user’s photo albums, then coming up with a list of tagging suggestions that the user simply accepts or declines.
However the software is still in its early stages and is far from perfected. Facebook engineers state that the software may not always be successful in recognising a face in a photograph, which could cause instances of incorrect tagging suggestions.
While this new feature may come as a blessing to many users, Facebook are aware that some people may have concerns with regards to privacy. Privacy concerns about Facebook are not new and the company is aware that the feature may not be to everyone’s liking. They state that the auto-tagging feature is completely optional and users can opt-out of it by altering their privacy settings if they choose to.
Despite these concerns, Facebook hopes that the new feature, which is being rolled out in the USA next week, will revolutionise the way in which users tag their photographs.
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