Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) has recently announced its new photo application called Moments which practically takes advantage of the network’s face-recognition tech to send a mass of images to people that appear on the particular pictures.
The app is currently officially available only in the US. Its arrival to Europe seems unlikely due to the continent’s privacy policy. According to BBC, Facebook’s Deep Face AI is capable of recognizing the network’s users with 97.25% accuracy. The specific feature was rolled out in 2010 and was forced to be removed from the European edition of the website due to privacy issues first claimed by the Irish data protection commission.
In addition, Facebook does not appear to have a plan on the table to sort out the issue. Facebook’s head of policy in Europe, Richard Allen, said:
“We don’t have an opt-in mechanism so it is turned off until we develop one.”
The face rec feature was not well received from Canada as well. This is Canada’s privacy commissioner comment on the mechanism at the time:
“Of significant privacy concern is the fact that Facebook has the ability to combine facial biometric data with extensive information about users, including biographic data, location data, and associations with friends.”
The same source reports that Facebook has got in talks with government agencies and private groups to address the matter by developing a respective algorithm, but apparently the negotiations have failed to a certain extent.
The aforementioned private groups announced in a joint statement:
“At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement – and identifying them by name – using facial recognition technology,.. Unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain agreement even with that basic, specific premise.”
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