As you probably know, Face.com has been acquired by Facebook at the end of May 2012. face.com is operating the largest face recognition platform on the cloud. But what is the aim of this acquisition and which functionalities are provided by face.com ?
As its name lets it presume, Face.com is a technology platform that offers facial recognition. This functionality allows for instance to scan a photo and search for faces that look like the one you provided in this photo. Other functionalities such as “face recognition” allow providing a minimum and maximum age of people on a picture or to tell you if people are smiling or not on a picture. An example of such application is given below, where I look older than I’m and additionally bad mood ;-).
One possible application for facebook is to be able to find your friends easily even if they are not tagged on a picture. If you have a facebook profile, there are probably many pictures of you in your picture library, as in other users’ libraries. There you may stand in a group photo for instance but where you are not tagged. With such an application finding all pictures of you in a few clicks will be a straightforward process. For sure this may drive some people in troubles ;-)).
In fact some features of face.com have already been implemented in facebook such as “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded” (cf below).
As you can see in your privacy settings (Timeline & tagging) the only choices are “Friends” and “No One.” “Friends” is set by default. Mindful of the potential drawbacks, Facebook doesn’t provide you the option to let strangers identify you based only on your face.
It is of course only one application of this powerful tool but for sure some others are going to be introduced in a near future with advantages and drawbacks.