Facebook strips out facial recognition for the European version of Moments
Nearly a year after the initial launch, Facebook has launched a new version of its Moments photo-sharing tool for Europe and Canada, and there's one very important difference from its US counterpart: the European version of the app won't scan your face.
The US version of Moments groups photos by people and places, playing off data from Facebook's facial-recognition-based photo-tagging system. But courts in both Canada and the European Union have ruled that Facebook's photo-tagging system violates privacy law, so the European version of the app had to rely on other methods. The new version asks users to manually identify the various faces, then looks for photos that "appear to include the same face" based on broader similarities. The result isn't as seamless as the US version, but it also doesn't need to collect biometric data in order to work.
