Facebook Knows What You Look Like
Facebook unleashes facial recognition software on cyberspace.
Facebook knows what you look like. "I know," you're saying, "I told them when I tagged myself in that picture." No no, they knew even before you were tagged, they knew even before you knew about the photograph. Because from now on Facebook will draw upon the billions of tagged photographs it has at its disposal to automatically recognise faces and suggest people to tag in the photos that you upload.
With the new feature, Facebook will compare photos uploaded by users to the tagged pictures that already exist in the Facebook database. If it gets a match, it will suggest names to attach to the new photos. They've argued that it's actually going to enhance privacy, since getting tagged alerts you to the photos of you on the internet you didn't know about, so you can remove the tag or ask the person who posted it to take it down.
But the implications of this are huge and spread wider than that. It could be the final undoing of underage drinkers worldwide - once law enforcement authorities have Facebook at their disposal and have tied the picture of you, aged sixteen, to the bottle of vodka in your hand, it's going to be hard to argue against that.
[Via Gawker]
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