Facebook is turning facial recognition back on – so here’s how to check your “photo tagging” settings. Facebook's controversial flirtation with facial recognition is back in the spotlight.
At the end of 2010, the tell-us-all-about-yourself social networking service announced that it would be using facial recognition to make it easier for you to tag other people in your photos. Just in case you didn't know the names of all of the "friends" in photos you'd uploaded, Facebook's plan was to help you out. Although it didn't try to do anything you couldn't have done yourself, and merely suggested a name and awaited your approval, there was no provision for the person whom Facebook thought it had recognised to get involved in the approval process. Facebook would tell you that you had been tagged, in case you wanted to opt out. But it wouldn't let you choose in the first place, even though it was claiming to know who you were. Facebook facial recognition software violates privacy laws, says Germany. FBI launches $1 billion face recognition project - tech - 07 September 2012. The Next Generation Identification programme will include a nationwide database of criminal faces and other biometrics "FACE recognition is 'now'," declared Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in a testimony before the US Senate in July.
It certainly seems that way. As part of an update to the national fingerprint database, the FBI has begun rolling out facial recognition to identify criminals. It will form part of the bureau's long-awaited, $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) programme, which will also add biometrics such as iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification to the toolkit.