Can Facebook Tell What You Look Like?

Facebook will try to make it easier to identify friends in photos uploaded to the social networking site by using facial recognition software to suggest people that users may want to tag.

In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook engineer Justin Mitchell said the new tag-suggestions feature will match new photos to others that people have already been tagged in. Similar photos will be grouped and the software will let users know who it thinks is in the shots.

Palo Alto-based Facebook already offers a way to tag one person in a group of photos, and it hopes this will add more simplicity to the process.

Tag suggestions will be rolled out in the U.S. in the coming weeks. Users who don't want their name suggested can use the site's privacy settings to turn the feature off.

Mitchell said over 100 million tags are linked to photos on Facebook daily.

[johnscott111]

This creates a whole dimension to privacy problems caused by Facebook. The additional software is completely unnecessary, Facebook in the name of making the site more convenient has made it completely unsafe to use. Its time to switch to more secure sites such as Mycube or Diaspora which provide much better control over user content.

[saucymugwump]

The Internet is an amazing tool, but most Americans use it to revert back to high school and its popularity contests. No wonder the rest of the world is rapidly usurping our place in the world.

[skeezix06]

Wow. More invasion of privacy. How much more 1984 can you get?