Facebook has outgrown every other social network, it has outgrown Flickr and Picasa and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has made history by becoming the youngest self made billionaire. He also grabbed the Time’s Person of the Year Award, beating the much controversial Julian Assange. There is everything credible about the social network and it keeps adding more value. I recall Facebook launching its Face Detection feature last year, using which Facebook detected similar faces in numerous photos of an album and tagged each one of them in one go. Well that’s improving, starting from today!
Today the social network boosted the usability of its photo product by enabling auto tagging of photos. How exactly? Facebook uses its face recognition feature to detect a person and then utilize your network of friends as reference to place tags on the people visible in the picture. With over a 100 million photos being tagged each day I think the new update would make tagging easier for all those photo lovers.
But, what about privacy? I for one won’t like being tagged without my permission or at least I would like to be notified to grant permission. This is exactly what the Facebook’s VP Product, Chris Cox had to address. Cox mentioned that users do have the choice to opt out of the feature altogether, disabling anyone to auto tag you using this feature. Seconding that he also mentioned that this won’t be used for a network wise face search and would strictly be applicable to the network of friends.
The feature will be rolled out to around 5% of the social network users initially. It’s just the start of it, so don’t be surprised if it tags Harry as Lynda, vice versa.
You can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook fanpage to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google and Apple.
