New Facebook tool raises privacy concerns

Soon Facebook users will no longer need to identify their friends in photographs as the website will do it for them.

In an announcement Tuesday, representatives of Facebook said they would be introducing a new facial recognition technology for the picture tagging process, the Hurriyet Daily News reported.

The technology – which piloted last year to a trial audience – will operate by recognizing faces from a database of all 500 million Facebook users.

Google halted release of a similar program, citing privacy issues associated with the software.

Hartmut Neven, Google's engineering director for image recognition said, “Let [Facebook] get burned first. There will be some backlash,” in an interview with CNN.

Facebook will allow users to opt out of this tool by editing their security preferences, but all users will still be scanned and entered in the database.

Facebook’s decision to launch this new tool has already created a huge backlash from bloggers within the social media community, who warn Facebook users to stay away from this new technology.

Computer scientists – and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg – have expressed doubt about the ability of an algorithm to process such a large number of faces effectively.

"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," Zuckerberg told CNN reporters in April. "But it actually turns out that the best way is to just have people tagged."

Ipplex CEO and Neven’s former colleague Orang Dialameh said Facebook’s size will prevent this program from working.

“Face technology will never work in gigantic databases," he said.

Photo Finder is an existing Facebook app that scans and recognizes faces for users.