Face Recognition Comes to Facebook

All of the changes Facebook has made recently haven’t been enough for me to want to close my account out, but this new one might just be the final straw.

Face.com is launching Photo Finder in Facebook, which will find and tag pictures of you and your friends with face recognition.

Photo Finder (Face.com)

We’re about helping people find photos, and as a first service we’re releasing a Facebook app called Photo Finder, which scans public photos in your social network and suggests tags for untagged faces. It’s a great way to find photos of yourself (or your friends) that you never knew existed, and stay up to date with your friends latest pics. [source ]

There are, of course, some privacy concerns around this application, and while they’ve been addressed by Face.com, I’m personally still not completely at ease.

The images themselves are not tagged in Facebook, they’re tagged only in the Photo Finder application. This means that unless others have the application installed, they can’t see the tags. That seems all well and good, but I can’t imagine people not wanting to see the tags and find the “lost” images of themselves, making the fact that only those with the application seeing your tags kind of moot.

I’m a bit surprised at my reaction to Photo Finder – I tend to have few concerns around privacy, and don’t publish anything on the internet that I don’t want to be found or seen. There’s just something bordering on creepy about this, but I also can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

Sarah Perez over at Read Write Web has a great overview of the service , complete with screenshots and explinations of how it all works. Go take a peek and see what you think. Am I making too much of a fuss over this?