Facial Recognition: Creepy, or Cool?

Facial recognition software: it sounds like something out of a science fiction movie – but it’s not.

Facebook recently unveiled its latest trick in the form of automatic tagging.  At first I thought it was cool, being able to mass tag friends in pictures rather than having to select each face individually; but then it started to creep me out a bit.  All of a sudden I realized that Facebook could actually tell the difference between all of my friends’ faces, suggesting peoples’ names as pictures uploaded.  The line between cool and weird began to blur very quickly.

This line blurred even more quickly when I tried to log into my Facebook from a new computer the other day.  While on vacation I accessed my account from a “foreign” device, prompting a quiz to appear in order to verify my identity.  One of the ways to verify my identity was to name friends in selected pictures.  I suddenly got very nervous.  For the first time I was afraid that the computer would win and I would be locked out of my own Facebook account – was this some kind of cruel joke?  I think I identified six different people, some of whom I barely even know in real life.  At that point I was sufficiently freaked out.  You know the saying, “the student becomes the teacher,” I felt as though Facebook was wagging its proverbial finger at me.

When new technology like this is released into the mainstream it is invariably met with some discord, and this addition has European Union members in an uproar.  Apparently people don’t like being ushered in to the world of facial recognition without proper notice.  Society always takes a while to catch up with technology, but has Facebook gone too far this time?  Admittedly, users can log into Facebook and turn off the auto-tagging feature, but those upset by the new addition argue that the option should have been to turn on the feature instead.  Automatically implementing this new technology without properly notifying users ahead of time is one of the main concerns in the EU upheaval.  People don’t seem to be as upset by the software itself but rather by the way it was implemented.

Although there is so much debate about the invasion of privacy the idea behind the new feature is genius.  Every Facebook user has experienced the mundane task of tagging friends in group photos, and now that feeling may be obsolete.  Regardless of protests, users will get used to this change just as they have adjusted to all the others over the years.  The only question now is: what’s next?

 

Sources: http://news.consumerreports.org/electronics/2011/06/eu-probes-facebooks-facial-recognition-software.html