While Facebook’s new photo-sharing app Moments launched in the United States this week, concerns regarding its use of facial recognition technology have prevented its European debut.
The new app arranges photos into groups on mobile phones, but that’s not the issue. The issue which has been raised by the Irish data regulator is in regards to the apps ability to identify Facebook friends through facial recognition technology — a feature which enables users to easily forward photos to friends.
The Irish data regulator has indicated that the feature must have an opt-in option which allows users to decide whether or not they want to use the facial recognition feature, BBC reported.
Richard Allan, Facebook’s head of policy in Europe, told the Wall Street Journal in an e-mail that the social networking giant doesn’t “have an opt-in mechanism so it is turned off until we develop one.”
He added that there’s no fixed timetable on the opt-in option’s development. Regulators have told us we have to offer an opt-in choice to people to do this (…) We don’t have an opt-in mechanism so it is turned off until we develop one. Belgium’s
Belgium’s data-protection watchdog has sued the company over its use of “like” and “share” buttons to track the activity of Internet users outside of its own site, the WSJ reported.
Earlier this year, the social network announced that its DeepFace AI system was capable of identifying users with a 97.25 percent level of accuracy. Facebook recently announced an update to its news feed which entails the incorporation of yet another metric used to determine relevance: how long users inspect stories on their news feeds.
In other news about Mark Zuckerberg’s social network, the company launched a new feature called Scrapbook intended for parents, children, pets and their owners.
