Facebook has been gathering data from you photos and has now created a new tool to use facial recognition to tag people in photos. This doesn't sound like a bad idea at first, even Google did this with Picasa. The bad part is this is Facebook. The site riddled with thousands of privacy issues that grow every time a new feature is launched.
The new feature doesn't give a person the chance to approve being tagged. This means if someone posts a bad picture of you in a bad situation, or a situation that looks bad but wasn't that photo could be put up by one of your friends and suddenly it's a mark on your record permanently. You can't take it down, you have no control over it.
Also you only have the option to opt out, it's not an opt in sort of thing, meaning if you know about it, you can try to dive into your privacy settings to find the opt out but you'll probably spend 15 minutes searching for it. It also means, right now the facial recognition software has been scanning all of your photos.
Facebook may even push the ability to use facial recognition onto their app developers, resulting in that facial recognition data being spread out across the world out of your control. This data could be used for harmful things, such as stalking a person, ruining someones reputation and more horrible acts. Facebook could even use it to tailor ads to you. For example, your buddy was drinking Michelobe Light in one of your photos, you didn't drink at all but were tagged in the photo. Suddenly beer ads start showing up like mad on your Facebook pages.
The software sees someone you're associated with smokes weed or does an illegal drug, suddenly your seeing related ads to that.
This information could be used later on to create a mobile app that could identify you in real time just by viewing your face for a split second. Instantly everything you did online is revealed to a person you never met just because they pulled out their phone for 2 seconds.
Google had actually planned on creating software that could do the above in Google Goggles but decided it was too big of a privacy issue. So Google put out that they will never create such software. Facebook on the other hand has a huge reputation of not caring about anyone's privacy and simply putting out peoples information then after months finally making it possible to hide it again.
What do you think of the new facial recognition tool? good, bad, unsure? post in the comments!
