Facebook's DeepFace...and What Facebook Can Do to Soothe Criticism over Privacy Concern

Taken from:

http://mashable.com/2014/03/19/facebook-facial-recognition-deepface/

 

And from:

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2014/03/19/Facebooks-Deep-Face-facial-recognition-technology-to-have-near-human-accuracy/3151395247809/

 

Facebook has developed facial recognition software called the DeepFace. This software is as accurate as human brain in recognizing people’s face.

DeepFace can look at two photos, and irrespective of lighting or angle, can say with 97.25% accuracy whether the photos contain the same face. Humans can perform the same task with 97.53% accuracy.

The software is soon to be used on the Facebook website to help automatically recognize faces on pictures and tag matching names with the faces from their database.

 

To understand the software better, we need to know what a facial recognition system is and how it works. A facial recognition system identifies faces by using algorithms that contain the information of facial features. The information contains the shape of individuals’ eyes, nose, ears, cheekbones, and their position and size. Computers can find matching features by comparing the information with the images of customers filed on the database of companies. When an individual is identified, personal information to that individual can be seen. The system can automatically recognize employees’ face, allowing the employees to access the retrieved information without going through separate ID card or a fingerprint recognition process.

 

As you may have noticed, facial recognition technology can be criticized as an invasion of privacy. Facebook may have to require its users to agree to submit their faces and save them in a company-wide database along with the individual personal information.

To soothe the criticism, Facebook should politely inform its users what facial recognition technology is and how it can help Facebook provide its users high quality services, probably in forms of a contract. Facebook should inform that the system will be photographing and saving users’ faces and promise that the images and information will not be used for any other purpose different from its service.

 

Another way to reduce the criticism is giving users choices. Users may or may not choose their images to be saved in the database of the company. If a user chooses not to be saved, then his/her image would not be saved, but the user would not receive the enhanced services. If this concern can be managed, the DeepFace software will lead Facebook into a bigger success.