Facebook and facial recognition

Happy Friday readers. As I sit back and enjoy my beer, I'm thinking about all the discussions I had with my friends and colleagues about Facebook's facial recognition technology over the last one week. For the uninitiated, on Dec 15, Facebook launched a feature called Tag Suggestions. It was meant to look at the pictures you upload to your account, scan all the pictures Facebook has in it's database, and use it's facial recognition technology to suggest who the people are in your uploads. Definitely makes the job of tagging people easier.

In case you haven't figured out so far, this technology can be misused. Let's take an example. A pedophile can take pictures of a child, upload the picture on Facebook, and in no time, he'll know all that he needs to know about this child--their likes, dislikes, where they study, who their friends are. On the other hand, there can be ways in which this technology can be very useful. Read this case of an American Marine, who found his long-lost brother using Facebook's technology.

Anyway, now that you are up-to-speed on what all the hue and cry around facial recognition technology is all about, let me get to the point I'm trying to make. Let's envision a world where this technology was used in the right way, and we were able to run scans on CCTVs to locate people. We could have a moving map of every person in the world (as long as they are close to some CCTV) in real time. We could reach a point where no one is ever lost or kidnapped. It's easy to locate criminals at any time. Imagine how many problems this could solve for the world. Of course, this means that the technology should be used only be the government, and in wrong hands, this could have disastrous results. But then, that's for Facebook at the governments around the world to decide.

For now, my recommendation is to use the follow the steps given on this link, and turn off Tag Suggestions in your Facebook account.