In an interesting move yesterday, Facebook has acquired Israel’s Face.com which is the team behind the face recognition technology on the social networking site.
Face.com is a face recognition technology company which makes mobile and Facebook apps which identifies people’s faces. They are an 11 member start-up located in Tel Aviv, Israel.
KLIK is one of their prominent apps which identifies and tags faces. Also PhotoTagger is another app which works heps improve auto tag on Facebook.
Facebook has purchased Face.com for somewhere between $55 – $60 million and it’s clear that the technology would be used to improve face detection and auto tagging on their mobile apps.
At the same time there are rumours doing the rounds which suggest that Facebook is building a huge database of images and it might want to monetize the same. This poses a huge security and privacy concern, something that Facebook is not popular for. Questions like who all would be able to see and access the database also arises and how Facebook would safeguard the same from falling into the wrong hands is another big concern.
For now, Facebook does offer you the option to turn off ‘Face Dtection’ in your ‘Privacy Settings’ and also the option to review the images you are tagged in.
Facebook has not provided any info on how the transition of the technology and the employees would take place.
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