Fb: to tag or not to tag

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I saw the writing on the wall the first time when Facebook’s Tag Suggest feature appeared and started asking users to tag their friends in photographs. I have never seen the feature make an incorrect recommendation.
But really, I guess I should have seen it much earlier, when the automated squares starting appearing around people’s faces in pictures. In Machine Learning — the field of computer science that deals with teaching computers how to learn from experience — there is a saying, that often it’s the person with the most data that wins.
Facebook certainly has enough data. Facebook hosted 240 billion photographs when Graph Search was launched earlier this year. With the latest change to their privacy rules they’ve announced that they are going to incorporate over a billion user profile pictures into their facial recognition databases. It is becoming clear that Facebook is trying to make an incredibly sophisticated facial recognition engine using its vast amounts of picture data.
The development has already sounded alarm bells in Europe, forcing the company to repeal the user data acquisition in Europe even after it declared that it will give users the option to opt out of the process.
Ever since rising to the top of the social media ladder by being the most ‘private’ social media website, Facebook has been playing fast and loose with user privacy. The drastic reversal even led the The New York Times to comment, “The company is also deliberately deleting information about specific privacy controls.” That is, information on privacy controls that used to be commonplace has been intentionally obfuscated.
The issues are complicated, but despite the massive potential for misuse, it is exciting to think how powerful a facial recognition engine built on Facebook’s image data really could be. It could potentially revolutionise the way criminal investigations are handled and would have many other potentially useful uses.
With this possibility becoming very real in the near future, we as a society need to take a closer look at our privacy and establish a consensus on what is right and what is wrong.