Facebook dodges facial recognition ban

11:32 • 11.05.16
Science/tech

Facebook has launched its facial-recognition-powered photo-sharing app in the EU and Canada.

The program - Moments - was released in some countries in 2015, but withheld elsewhere because of local data privacy rules, BBC News reported.

The company has created a different version of the software to get around these restrictions.

But it acknowledged the new edition required "a little bit of work" for users to get the most out of it.

Moment's core features are that it automatically groups together photos featuring the same friend or friends, and then makes it easy to share the pictures with them if they have installed the same app.


In the original version, the snaps are automatically tagged with people's names, because Facebook is able to match them to other photos in its wider database.

But data protection watchdogs in the EU and Canada had expressed concern their citizens would have no way to opt out of the process.

To address this, the adapted app now links together photos of similar-looking faces but requires the user to identify who they are.

Moments is not the only app to use facial recognition to sort images.

Google Photos is the most popular alternative to do so.

But the search giant has yet to extend the facility to Europe, to avoid falling foul of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.

Facebook has not disclosed how many people have signed up to Moments since its release on the US's iOS and Android stores 11 months ago.

However, the company has said more than 600 million pictures have been shared via the app so far.

"Our primary purpose is to solve a problem that we know that people have, where they never get the photos that their friends take of them," the app's product manager Will Ruben told the BBC.

"We view that as a pretty different type of sharing than might happen on Facebook, where people share photos more broadly with a large group of friends or even publicly.

 

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