There’s a good chance that all of us have heard a friend mention that Facebook is getting “creepy”. From making new friend suggestions of people you just met, or developing their face recognition technology, it’s reasonable to believe that Facebook knows more about us than we think.
For those who are weary of Facebook recognizing their own face, the situation just got a bit more, well, creepy.
In a paper presented by the company in early June, Facebook unveiled new research that will allow their face recognition technology to recognize people not necessarily just by their faces, but a stream of contextual information as well. These points of information include hairstyle, clothing, and other factors.
According to Yann LeCun, the Head of Artificial Intelligence at Facebook, there is more to seeing a person than just their face. “People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back,” says LeCun in an article covering the subject in New Scientist. He then goes on to make that point that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is easily recognizable due to his signature t-shirt and jeans ensemble.
The recognition method, known as PIPER (pose invariant person recognition), is able to identify people with an 83% accuracy rate, but there is still plenty of work that needs to be done before PIPER sees the light of day.
In fact, according to several sources, it’s not very likely that we’ll see PIPER in action on any social media in the near future. Ari Entin, a spokesperson for Facebook told the technology publication Ars Technica that the process is in the early stages, and that the research is long-term.
Privacy Concerns
Even if we won’t see the roll-out of this new algorithm for years to come, it’s still a good time to discuss the many privacy implications that could come about as a result.
Anyone that has been following Facebook for the past several years would be able to recall the many issues that privacy advocate groups have had with the social network. Many see the proliferation of automated recognition technology to be the beginning of the end of anonymity.
There is currently one lawsuit happening in Illinois against Facebook by a man who says that Facebook’s current auto-tagging feature (in which your Facebook is completely visible) breaches the privacy rights of the state. The case is ongoing, and rather difficult to decide on, as facial recognition technologies don’t really have much regulation on them at all.
It’s reasonable to believe that with new developments such as what Facebook released with their research, more regulations and law will come about.