Facebook is getting “aggressive” about tagging people in photos posted on the social networking site. Its facial-recognition software, with the creepy name DeepFace, is going through the massive archive of photos and identifying people.
And the software is good at it.
In fact, DeepFace is now “as accurate as a human being at a few constrained facial recognition tasks,” according to Science.
If you don’t want to be tagged in a photo, say an old photo from your carefree college days, Facebook will tag it for you.
“They’re going back to older photos,” said CNET’s Dan Ackerman, and tagging anyone the software recognizes. And it recognizes a lot of people. That’s because the more photos uploaded of the same people, the better the software gets at recognizing faces that pop up over and over again. And users upload some 400 million new photos a day. That’s a lot of learning.
“It knows other people you know, it knows their faces,” Ackerman added. “It has a lot of examples of those faces. That’s how facial recognition works; it needs a bunch of different samples to be able to guess at what it is.”
There is a way to turn it off, but “Facebook doesn’t tend to make that particularly easy.”