Facebook Can Now Find Your Face, Even When It's Not Tagged
Facebook just loosened the leash a little on its facial-recognition algorithms. Starting Tuesday, any time someone uploads a photo that includes what Facebook thinks is your face, you’ll be notified even if you weren’t tagged.
The new feature rolled out to most of Facebook’s more than 2 billion global users this morning. It applies only to newly posted photos, and only those with privacy settings that make an image visible to you. Facebook users in Canada and the European Union are excluded. The social network doesn’t use facial-recognition technology in those regions, due to wariness from privacy regulators.
Facebook has steadily expanded its use of facial recognition over the years. The company first offered the technology to users in late 2010, with a feature that suggests people to tag in photos. Backlash against the way users were automatically opted into that system is one reason Facebook’s algorithms are face blind in Canada and the EU today. Elsewhere, the company made new efforts to notify users, but left the feature essentially unchanged. In 2015, the company launched a photo-organization app called Moments that uses facial recognition to help you share photos with people in your snaps.
