By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-12-21 12:18:39 | Word Count: 664
The Photos section of Facebook is being upgraded with facial recognition technology. Potentially controversial, the new upgrade will suggest to users who should be tagged in a photos using facial recognition, hence the name of e application: Tag Suggestions.
The feature will work by searching your photos for untagged people and using face recognition, it will suggest someone from among your friend list to label a person in the photo. It will automatically fill in the “Who is this?” bar (that pops up when hovering over an individual in the photo) with that person’s name. All you have to do is click save if it is accurate and then Tag Suggestions will also send the tag link to the appropriate friend automatically.
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Obviously, the most pressing concern is that if this face recognition software is at work assessing all the people in photos on the 500 million plus Facebook profiles—which amounts to a heck of a lot more people that 500 million—then we are one step closer to Big Brother.
How is this information going to be used? Once Tag Suggestions is rolled out fully, who is going to be interested in and possibly able to purchase this information that links your name with your face?
The answer to the question is made even more obscure by the fact that millions of Facebook’s users are located in overseas, sovereign territories. Although Facebook has been often embroiled in legal issues concerning privacy, does this upgrade go too far? Will images of our own faces become something we have no control over?
Before you think I’ve been watching too many spy movies, just remember that the internet can be an unsafe place where someone with the right set of skills and resources can effectively mine and use data for their own evil gain—which they do all the time. Just ask someone who sent money to Nigeria. Look at what those who sympathized with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were able to do to the likes of Mastercard and Visa. Keep in mind they said they didn’t want to permanently harm those businesses; those attacks were ‘mild’ attacks.
And then there’s always the worry by some as to how this information could be used by defense departments, especially in war times, against both domestic and foreign individuals. Before you say those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, think again. If you are unfortunate enough to be mixed up in a case of mistaken identity with a law enforcement arm of the government, it can be an extremely long, difficult ordeal trying to prove your innocence.
Those who have nothing to hide might indeed have every reason to fear from the tide of privacy concerns and unforeseeable impact that something as benign as Facebook’s Tag Suggestions upgrade might bring later on. Bear in mind that Facebook is not releasing how accurate the program’s suggestions will be.
Since most people hate having to go through all their photos to tag everyone, no doubt an upgrade that will easily do it for them will go over well with users. Facebook claims that Tag Suggestions will simply cause more people to connect to each other in a different way and that users will be able to ‘Opt Out’. However, if your face has already been ‘recognized’ on someone else’s page, I’m not sure how much an ‘opt out’ is going to go to protect you if you’re in the minority about how great this upgrade is.
Like Facebook itself, only time will tell how a face recognition program applied to the photos in half a billion people’s profile pages will impact our culture. Here’s hoping we don’t end up anywhere near the sentiment behind Jimmy Kimmel’s ‘National Unfriend Day’ invocation.
