The up and coming Face'Detecting'Book

"Tagging launch: Facebook accused of eroding privacy"

Today's Metro newspaper ran the headline with an outburst on Facebook's new face detection feature, created to enhance our tagging experience. Facebookers are currently using the new pop up image viewer, but what hasn't quite caught on yet in Britain is the new recognition feature, which can also help the lazier bunch of users who can't be bothered to draw a mouse over a face to tag.

On the positive note, Facebook claims to improve the tagging process with its precision in tagging. It works like the face recognition function on digital cameras; when you next want to tag someone in a photo an automatic box will border only around the face, so all we need to do is type in the name and its ready to go. EASY and FAST.

So what makes this a piece of innovative technology? Well, Google Maps street view developed a complicated face tracker that ensured that the peoples faces in shot were blurred. The funny thing is in 2009 I was on holiday in Lisbon with my friends, and we actually saw the giant google mobile roaming around the tourist spot, and a few months later we found ourselves on street view with our faces blurred (for privacy issues). Now Facebook has latched onto the idea of face recognition to improve the convenience of tagging, I can only imagine the convenience when you get the moments when 2 heads are too close together to tag, instead you end up having to tag a leg or something stupid.

Unfortunately this has only been trialled in the U.S and has not yet reached us. As for Metro's headline, this technology is not breaching privacy, well not unless they are capable to detect individual user faces along with the persons name-which they can't do...yet?