We all use Facebook. I mean, unless you're living in the Ugandan bush country, you probably have a Facebook profile, even if you don't use it all that much. Facebook has permeated seemingly every aspect of our lives, and now they're taking a step deeper into our identities.
Yesterday (Tuesday 12/19), Facebook announced that it is rolling out facial recognition software. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, the facial recognition tools are simply to protect your privacy online (yeah, ok). Here's how they say they'll use it:
- Facebook will alert you when photos of you are uploaded, even if you haven’t been tagged in them. This happens even if you aren’t friends with the person who uploaded the photo, so long as you’re included the audience group specified by the uploader’s privacy settings.
- Facebook will alert you if your face is included in a profile picture. This update is aimed squarely at preventing catfishing and “revenge porn” style attacks, where someone creates a fake profile using intimate photos of a person without their consent.
- Finally, visually impaired users can now hear aloud who’s tagged in photos alongside them.
The catch, of course, is that you’ll have to authorize Facebook to access, store, and then match your face data with uploads across the site.
[Gizmodo]