Facebook will tag every picture which has you, whether you ask it to or not

If reports are true, gone are the days when you would require to tag yourself and your friends in pictures on Facebook. The social media site is getting smarter at recognising faces, and will tag pictures you upload without you even having to manually do that yourself.

According to a report in DailyDot , the author uploaded a test album of 15 photos and Facebook was able to tag eight of the pictures with her name. These were brand new pictures with her in them, taken at various locations. Facebook’s face-recognition algorithm was powerful enough to recognise the face in well-lit photographs, and tag it for her. The surprising thing was, that the author did not ask Facebook to scan or tag the images - it just happened automatically as the photographs were being uploaded.

Many a times you may want to keep your albums private. But with the automatic Facebook tagging system, the people whose faces are also tagged by the intelligent algorithm, get a notification from Facebook - thus making the album viewable to whoever is tagged in the pictures. The fact that Facebook knows your face so well and is on a tagging spree without you asking it to, is scary.

Facebook’s facial recognition technology is possible due to its acquisition of an Israeli company called face.com, which Facebook used to license before outright buying it.

Facebook’s ability to automatically tag photos, and make the photos viewable to your tagged friends - ensures more people engage with your pictures. This translates to more time spent on the platform by users to like or comment on the photos. Which ultimately leads to monetary gains for Facebook.

According to a report published in  Science magazine , Facebook’s facial recognition technique is called DeepFace and is as good as humans when it comes to facial recognition tasks. At the moment, DeepFace is working on tagging individual pictures from a group photo. This can lead to a lot of privacy violations, as you may not really want to be identified in crowd in pictures you have no clue were clicked in the first place.

According to Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence researcher Yann LeCus, Facebook will send alerts telling you that you are present in a picture. If you want protect your privacy you can have your face blurred out from the said picture.

To keep things in perspective, Facebook has 1.39 billion users who upload around 400 million pictures daily. To think that Facebook will now identify your picture in a crowd and go ahead and tag it, dosen’t just sound creepy, it is actually creepy.