Tagging photos on Facebook has gotten easier, and it probably will just head towards that same direction over time. Last year, the social media bigwig has launched Deepface, a facial recognition artificial intelligence technology which the site boasts of 97.25% accuracy on recognizing faces. It is amazingly and eerily close to the human ability to do the same.
Now, Facebook team has gotten a step further and introduced another artificial intelligence technology that can recognize people even without their faces. BBC reported that the new technology can accomplish that by looking at hair, clothing, and other identification cues like posture and body type. This recognition intelligence boasts of 83% accuracy according to reports.
Facebook has taken revolutionary steps with its development of identification technology, blurring the already 'blurred lines' between human capacity and artificial intelligence, social and private. This caused concerns on privacy rights to raise. Just recently, Facebook's newest photo sharing platform Moments was not made available in Europe due to its alleged violation of European privacy laws.
BBC reports that Canada's privacy commissioner recently pointed out the social networking site's capacity to take facial biometrics and personal information of its users simultaneously, a privacy issue that does not sit well with regulators of certain countries. The Belgian security is also reportedly taking the privacy issues to court following allegations that Facebook monitors its users activities online, even outside the social networking site.
Will Facebook be tagging pictures even without our visible faces anytime soon? As of this writing, Facebook has not indicated any plans to integrate its latest technology on the social networking site. If its facial recognition innovations have caused such issues among privacy watchdogs in different countries, how much more will a technology that can recognize and, if integrated to a social media platform, potentially provide personal information?
Applications with similar features have been the subjects of various debates, and Facebook itself is still coming in, fresh from its app's release's cancellation in Europe. With all these being considered, maybe back view photos of users won't be autotagged anytime soon. But with the technology, and of course, Facebook still evolving and widely used amid the controversies, it's only a matter of time before anonymity goes down the drain altogether.
