We had to know this was coming: Facebook, the uber-application that has rapidly aggregated unprecedented amounts of very personal, very detailed information about 600 million humans (and counting!), now uses facial-recognition software to identify people in photographs uploaded to the service.
Each time a Facebook user “tags” someone in a photo – that is, names the people in a posted photo – the service’s computers make a note of the name and the face. With this information, aggregated across Facebook, people in other photographs can be easily identified.
Facebook honchos say the feature is all about “convenience,” but privacy advocates are calling it “creepy.” And they’ve asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate. They suggest that with this kind of information in a central database, it will become easy to take photos of a crowd of strangers and then not only identify them, but have access to mountains of information about them.
At present, Facebook only suggests names of people that are already your “friends” (cough, cough), but there’s no telling what will happen going forward.
While there’s no question that social-networking services like Facebook provide great utility, is there a point at which users will say the aggregation of so much detailed data – used currently to target advertising but for still-unknown future cashing-in purposes – has become dangerous?
Should a single private company have this much personal information? Given the company’s willingness to hand over personal information to government authorities whenever requested, is this something we should all be concerned about? What if the government decides it’s a matter of “national security” (cough, cough) for the FBI to have access to Facebook’s entire facial-recognition database engine?
And I’m not just talking about the danger of the wider world seeing photos of you, a bit tipsy, at Pittsfield’s Third Thursday, or that embarrassing photo of you cheering (and crying!) at a Justin Bieber concert. (Given the growing belief that “It Didn’t Even Happen Unless I’ve Posted Photos On Facebook,” it seems few people are shy about sharing everything.)
By the way, rest assured that Red Crow News will never use information we gather about readers for any nefarious purpose. In fact, we don’t gather any information about you, beloved reader. Your information belongs to you.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Each time you visit redcrownews.com, our site quietly employs an advanced algorithm to remove an imperceptibly small amount of your life force, or “ch’i,” to (a) power our Web servers, (b) give our staff super-human strength, and (c) keep our coffee warm. Thought you’d want to know!
–Bill Shein