Google+ Photos to Have Find My Face Recognition
Google announced that their social networking site, Google+, would incorporate a new feature that would make facial recognition technology available for pictures that will be uploaded in Google+.
This new feature is dubbed as "Find My Face" and it is described as a feature wherein "Google+ can prompt people you know to tag your face when it appears in photos." Users can still have control over which tags that they would accept or reject as well as opting to turn off this feature in their Google+ settings. Matt Steiner, an Engineering Lead for Google wrote in his blog post regarding this new additional feature for Google+. Steiner also added that this feature would be "rolling out in a few days" and feedback regarding this feature would be appreciated.
A product counsel from Google named Benjamin Petrosky revealed more about this feature during a Federal Trade Commission forum focusing on facial recognition technology. Petrosky was quoted stating "When a Google+ user uploads a photo, for example, they will receive a prompt to opt-in to Find My Face, turn the feature on or say no, Petrosky said. If you upload dozens of photos from a party the night before, the facial-recognition technology will look through those photos and suggest people to tag; anyone who is tagged will receive an email notification, with the option to untag themselves." Petrosky also added that this face-detection technique is already incorporated in Google image search especially if users would opt to find photos with faces. One example Petrosky gave was when the "rice" would be typed in the search bar, photos of people like Anne Rice would appear in the search results.
Google has already dabbled with facial-recognition technology in the past before incorporating it to Google+. Back in 2008, the company added the service to Picasa through using the technology the company acquired from Neven. This Picasa tool enable users to identify the people in the uploaded photos and it will suggest tags for the pictures used based on facial similarities.
Google+ rival, Facebook also incorporated a similar feature in their site but this was met with a lot of negativity especially from regulators. This is due to the fact that the social networking site did not properly inform their users that this feature would be going live.