Face.com Launches New Photo Tagger

(Photo via ReadWriteWeb)

First Face.com brought us Photo Finder, which started the process of scanning through the 15 billion pictures on Facebook (9,000 images per minute!), and now ReadWriteWeb reports that the company is using the same facial recognition algorithm – the "hybrid descriptor-based funneled" model – to launch Photo Tagger. While very similar in nature to the original Photo Finder, Photo Tagger "...scans through select online albums to automate the tagging process" to speed up the monotonous process of tagging albums. It doesn't matter if the album is yours or a friend's – Photo Tagger will take care of the entire process and save you endless hours of manual tagging.

While I'm not sure how Photo Finder and Photo Tagger differ exactly – of course I have a few ideas – with more and more facial recognition technologies finding their ways to online photo services, I do know it will be tougher and tougher to hide your face online. Bad lighting, odd angling and unfocused photographs look to be no match for Face.com (and the plethora of other photo applications).

Good Luck Hiding Your Face From Face.com

I wrote about this new site about a month ago and exciting new statistics from the alpha launch are detailed on Mashable today.

Although only a few thousand people have the application installed (myself included), Face.com has already tagged over 700,000 faces across 400 million (public) photos.

With the 15 billion pictures already on Facebook, Face.com is already fast at work going through the many fraternity party, wedding reception and family vacation pictures on the social networking site. In fact, it is tagging more than 9,000 images a minute! And if reports are correct, the tagging capabilities seem to be mostly accurate.

Exciting to see facial recognition coming into its own -- Face.com on Facebook, Flickr's use of Polar Rose, iPhoto's new Faces application...

Who knows where it will pop up next?

Face.com Brings Face Rec to Facebook

I was just accepted to the Face.com Alpha release and getting set up with the new service was pretty simple:

1) Face.com sent me an email with a Facebook link to their application.

2) I clicked the link and was asked to log on to my Facebook account.

3) The application then asked for permission to access my photos...and my friends photos.

4) Processing

5) Processing

6) Processing

7) I was presented with bunch of pictures of me that the software had found.



All-in-all not a bad experience and the facial recognition accuracy seems pretty good so far. I'll keep digging and check back in later with what I find out.

Facebook: The New Look of Surveillance

http://www.alternet.org/story/72556/

Facebook sparked an immediate national uproar when it was launched in 2002. Today, the activism has waned, and the surveillance continues largely unabated.

People know their actions are tracked online, says a Facebook spokesperson, just
as they're tracked on streets filled with surveillance cameras, whether
privately controlled through an ATM or publicly controlled [for] legitimate
anticrime or anti-terrorism purposes. In an era of massive top-down
surveillance, posting information on a website may feel downright redundant.

Facebook's growing dominance reflects a society that is increasingly complacent with spying. And while social networking is a free and convenient service, abdicating control of personal information, photos, writing, videos, and memories seems like a high price to pay