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Facebook’s Facial Recognition Is Getting So Good It Doesn’t Need Faces

Facial recognition technology, when deployed on a site like Facebook, is both convenient and disconcerting. Amazing but creepy. If you upload a lot of photos, Facebook’s facial recognition techn...
Facebook’s Facial Recognition Is Getting So Good It Doesn’t Need Faces
Written by Josh Wolford
  • Facial recognition technology, when deployed on a site like Facebook, is both convenient and disconcerting. Amazing but creepy. If you upload a lot of photos, Facebook’s facial recognition technology is great. Ain’t nobody got time to tag.

    As it stands, Facebook’s facial recognition tech is pretty good. Apparently, it’s about to get scary good.

    New Scientist reports on a new Facebook facial recognition algorithm that doesn’t even need to see your face. I guess it’s more like a person recognition algorithm.

    According to Facebook’s head of Artificial Intelligence, this new algorithm can identify people in photos based on their hair, clothes, body type, and even the way they’re standing.

    “There are a lot of cues we use. People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back,” Facebook head of AI Yann LeCun told New Scientist. “For example, you can recognize Mark Zuckerberg very easily, because he always wears a gray T-shirt.”

    And it reportedly works 83 percent of the time.

    Impressive. And creepy.

    Facial recognition isn’t as much of a hot-button issue in the States (though some are concerned), but overseas it is the worry of many a privacy group. Facebook’s recently-launched Moments photo sharing app is not launching in Europe due to concerns over facial recognition.

    So, if you think you can hide from Facebook’s robot people-spotting tech by covering your face, well, you probably can’t. I guess you could just stop wearing that one hoodie all the time.

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