Facial recognition comes to Facebook photos; will police use it to ID suspects?

[Newsjock]

CNBC's John Carney:
http://twitter.com/carney/status/15198737873764352#
This will be used by police to ID suspects from photos. RT: “@caro: Facial recognition comes to Facebook photo tags http://bit.ly/h7NBFd”

Source: CNet

Taking yet another step in the ongoing process of upgrading its photo-sharing service, Facebook announced today that it will soon enable facial-recognition technology--meaning that when members upload photographs and are encouraged to "tag" their friends, they will be able to choose from a list of suggestions.

Thanks to its treasure trove of user photos that have already been tagged, not to mention personal profile photos, Facebook has built up a huge base of data for gauging exactly who's in what photo. There are now 100 million photo uploads per day, according to Facebook, and 100 million "tags" each day as well. Tagging is also a hallmark of Facebook's photo product, which was otherwise bare-bones, difficult to use, and lagged behind competitors at its launch. Being able to annotate each photo with friends' names was largely what propelled Facebook Photos forward.

"Tagging is actually really important for control, because every time a tag is created it means that there was a photo of you on the Internet that you didn't know about," Facebook Vice President of Product Chris Cox told CNET. "Once you know that, you can remove the tag, or you can promote it to your friends, or you can write the person and say, 'I'm not that psyched about this photo.'"

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20025818-36.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

[Taverner]

1. Of course they will!

Of course it would be dumb to go on facebook if you're on the lam...

[mmonk]

2. It's interesting. I get notices of photo tags now.

One was a picture of my third grade class someone posted.

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

3. Orwell was wrong.

He failed to foresee that we'd all willingly be carrying the cameras around.
http://ih0.redbubble.net/work.4643813.2.flat,135x135,075,t.jpg

[HopeHoops]

4. Not me - I've got the little cut-out figure for my avatar.

Curiously, it pretty much uniquely identifies me now since every-fucking-body else has a picture up.

[Statistical]

5. It doesn't matter.

Say a friend takes a photo of you, or takes a photo and you are in the background. They tag you (your facebook profile) to the photo. Another friend does that, another does that. FB stores the biometrics of each photo in a database. After a certain point FB will enough datapoints to analyze a future photo with an unknown person and match it against its database.

Now this unknown photo might be another friend who couldn't remember your name, it also might be the police feeding in a photo of you because they are looking for you.

[HopeHoops]

6. Damn. You mean they might find out I'm really Charles Manson?

[Statistical]

7. Better delete that facebook account now.

Seriously though all it can do is link photos.

If your facebook profile doesn't have useful information for whoever is looking for you it is a dead end.

However I imagine within a month we will see a story of someone with outstanding warrant who had some location information (full address, phone number, employer, etc) on facebook and got nabbed via face matching technology.

[HopeHoops]

8. They've already been using it for that - just by looking people up by name.

Not long ago, they busted some woman who had bragged on her facebook page about vandalizing another woman's car (boyfriend related).