10 Jun

Facebook Now Able To Book Your Face!

Posted in News on 10.06.11 by John Meloche

This week, the Synergy Marketing Consultants Blog has been all about utilizing the internet to help promote your business. Practicing what we preach, we often encourage our clients to peruse our very own website in an effort to pick out the promotional items that would best suit the needs of their customers.

As well, we acknowledge the widespread use of social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook as extremely useful outlets for business owners to expand the reach of their companies. Very interestingly, we discovered this week that France is putting a stop to promoting Facebook in television ads. Check out yesterday’s blog for more details.

Nevertheless, Facebook is still looking to expand its many ways that it allows users to connect with each other. On Wednesday, Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters reported that Facebook is unleashing yet another new technology that will automatically be able to identify people in photographs.

And to be honest, this seems to have many people a bit more concerned than they are excited. Perhaps, Facebook is now literally trying to live up to its name by being able to identify or “book” a person’s face by suggesting to a user to “tag” that person in a photo. But this new feature raises the issue of privacy, says Oreskovic.

Maybe this is another reason why France is attempting to limit Facebook’s power in the advertising world. Perhaps not, but Facebook did mention earlier this week that the new feature is being expanded outside of the United States to other countries. And apparently, this new facial recognition system was enabled earlier this week without giving Facebook users any notice.

Sophos senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley feels that this is the first sign that Facebook is breaching privacy regulations. Said Cluley: “Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth.” To this, Facebook responded by admitting that they “should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.”

Facebook did go on to reveal that this new feature only suggests tagging a person by facial recognition when new photos are added to Facebook. As well, only friends can be suggested for tagging and users may disable this feature at any time. The way we figure it, if a person is so greatly concerned about privacy, he or she shouldn’t be on Facebook to begin with!

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