Availability of technology to automatically identify people in photos
Facebook has quietly expanded the availability of technology
to automatically identify people in photos, renewing concerns about the privacy
practices of the world's top social networking service.
The feature, which Facebook automatically enabled for Facebook users, has been expanded
from the United States to "most countries", Facebook said on its official blog on
Tuesday, 7th June 2011.
Its "Tag Suggestions" feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the
process of labelling friends and acquaintances that appear in photos posted on Facebook.
The company's roll-out of the technology has raised eyebrows in some circles. Internet
security consultant firm Sophos published a post on its company blog on Tuesday,
7th June 2011 saying that many Facebook users are reporting that the site has enabled
the facial recognition option in the last few days without giving users any notice.
"Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by
stealth," wrote Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos.
Facebook, which announced in December that it planned to introduce the service in
the United States, acknowledged on Tuesday, 7th June 2011 that the feature was in
fact now more widely available.
When asked about the Sophos blog post, Facebook said in an emailed statement that
"we should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this
became available to them."
The statement noted that the photo-tagging suggestions are only made when new photos
are added to Facebook, that only friends are suggested and that users can disable
the feature in their privacy settings.
The company did not respond to requests for further comment.
While other photo software and online services such as Google Inc's Picasa and Apple
Inc's iPhoto use facial recognition technology, the use of the technology on an
Internet social network like Facebook, which counts more than 500 million users,
could raise thorny privacy issues.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the non-profit privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy
Information Center, noted that Apple's iPhoto software gave users control over facial
recognition technology by letting them elect whether or not to use the technology
with their personal photo collections.
Facebook's technology, by contrast, operates independently, analysing faces across
a broad swath of newly uploaded photos.
Rotenberg said such a system raised questions about which personally identifiable
information, such as email addresses, would become associated with the photos in
Facebook's database. And he criticised Facebook's decision to automatically enable
the facial-recognition technology for Facebook users.
"I'm not sure that's the setting that people would want to choose. A better option
would be to let people opt-in," he said.
Last year the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint
about Facebook's privacy practices with the US Federal Trade Commission, which Rotenberg
said was still pending. He noted that he planned to take a close look at Facebook's
new announcement involving facial recognition technology.
Courtesy: DNA India
