Palo Alto, Jun 8 (Daily Bhaskar) : Privacy concerns of Facebook users doesn’t seem to have deterred Mark Zuckerberg from ploughing ahead and launching yet another such feature that threatens the security of the surfers – Facial Recognition System.
So if you are concerned about your boss not seeing your pictures of you drunk at a party, now would be a good time to delete them. According to the tech magazine PC World’s website, Sophos, a security firm has warned that the popular social networking site has enabled the technology on user accounts without informing the users of the change.
According to PCworld.com, Facebook had launched the facial recognition system last December but only made it available to users within the United States. There's probably good reason for this: privacy laws outside of this country are a lot stricter, and the site probably would have found itself in hot water rather quickly.
While the feature was not available to all, the catch is that one cannot opt out of it to avoid being tagged in embarrassing or private pictures without consent.
What the facial recognition system does is recognise you in a photograph and ask your friends to tag you. This will in all probability mean that your pictures will get tagged.
Earlier, friends could always tag photos of you, and you would have to un-tag yourself manually. The difference is that the process is now semi-automated, and this may give rise to privacy issues.
Security firms concerned
According to PCworld.com, Sophos' Graham Cluley seems to agree: "The onus should not be on Facebook users having to 'opt-out' of the facial recognition feature, but instead on users having to 'opt-in,'" Cluley argues. "It feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth."
Facebook is making changes to the process for tagging friends in photos uploaded to the social network, the company announced on Tuesday.
According to CNN, Facebook had tested the facial recognition system on a test group last year.
More than 500 million users of the popular Social networking site has been automatically included in the database, but contrary to reports, CNN adds that the company is allowing each person to choose whether to be identified by toggling a pane in the account's privacy settings.
The tool would still scan that person's face and figure out who it is, but it won't display that information. People can still manually tag friends.
Outrage among users
According to CNN, the news sparked a small brushfire of media hostility and bloggers have called the tool and Facebook's decision not to ask before including everyone- unsettling while others urged readers to opt out.
Meanwhile , Google’s CEO Eirc Schmidt recently said at a conference that Google had an application which would allow a person to click someone’s picture and use the application to find out who the person is.
However, Schmidt added that for security and privacy reasons, the application had been shut down.
Photo-management software such as Google's Picasa and Apple's iPhoto provide a similar feature. They pore over a person's snapshots in an attempt to group each person together by facial features. Google has not enabled this feature on the online version of its photo software, called Picasa Web Albums.
With the largest photo-sharing service in Facebook scanning millions of pictures daily, these algorithms are no doubt learning quickly. More than 100 million photos per day are uploaded to Facebook, according to a company statement.
The face-scanning feature actually runs counter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments to reporters in November.
"Before people-tagging came out, I think most people would have said that the best way to figure out who's in photos was to have some face-recognition algorithm," he said. "But it actually turns out that the best way is to just have people tagged."
However, what is spooky is that the Zuckerberg seems determined to take the choice of whether we want to be a part of the new application out of our hands and introduce it on the social networking system stealthily.