Don’t be a Weirdo: Facebook’s Freaky Facial Recognition

Don’t be a Weirdo: Facebook’s Freaky Facial Recognition

Creepy and intrusive. These are words that come to mind when Kipp thinks about Facebook’s Facial Recognition feature. Where’s the value in it?...other than more efficient stalking

June 12, 2011 1:01 by p.deleon

Reuters has run an interesting story on a Facebook function. If you haven’t read the piece, essentially the argument is around the development of its new facial recognition function. The new and improved feature is able to find and select the faces of a picture you upload on Facebook and accordingly suggest names to be tagged for each page.

Having used the feature, Kipp will have to admit the function has always been right on the money. Now of course, this feature isn’t new or unique to Facebook; Picasa and iPhoto make use of similar facial recognition technology.

But don’t you think this feature is crossing over a very thing borderline between innocently efficient friend-tagging and a freakish show of power over how much Facebook can actually control the information you supply them?

This bold move by Facebook to actually suggest they know who your friends are, and their direct FB I.D., is just a little too 1984 for us.

It’s bad enough that the all-pervasive Facebook already has as wide a coverage as it already enjoys, but enabling the facial recognition functionwithout the user’s approval is a whole different level of creepy.

So which camp do you fall in? Do you think Facebook’s new facial recognition is freakishly intrusive or just plain efficient?

Tags: Facebook, facebook facial recognition, facial recognition facebook

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2 Comments

DeTagged on June 13, 2011 6:03 am

FB has always behaved deceptively from grabbing your details via your friends’ pages – when you didn’t want them to take the information directly – to hiding the logout button so they could tell advertisers there were far more people (technically) online than was actually the case.
Unfortunately the wave of anti-FB publicity that should accompany this latest stunt probably won’t happen because the mass media have mostly been hooked into thinking that FB actually offers them something.
Possibly the French have the right idea, banning the word “Facebook” from the media and replacing it with “social media” or similar.
Liz on June 13, 2011 7:14 am

I don’t have a problem with this, I don’t really see how it affects privacy. I do think people put far too much personal information including photos on FB and that one needs to be extremely careful about that, but if you don’t want your pictures on FB then don’t put them on. And if someone else posts you in an embarassing situation, maybe you shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place.