Google+ Photos Get Automatic 'Find My Face' Recognition
Google will make facial-recognition technology available for photos uploaded to its Google+ social network via "Find My Face."
Google on Thursday announced that it will make facial-recognition technology available for photos uploaded to its Google+ social network.
With Find My Face, "Google+ can prompt people you know to tag your face when it appears in photos," Google's Matt Steiner wrote in a Google+ post. "Of course, you have control over which tags you accept or reject, and you can turn the feature on or off in Google+ settings."
Benjamin Petrosky, a product counsel at Google, provided a few more details about the product this afternoon at a Federal Trade Commission forum on facial-recognition technology.
When a Google+ user uploads a photo, for example, they will receive a prompt to opt-in to Find My Face, turn the feature on (see image below), or say no, Petrosky said. If you upload dozens of photos from a party the night before, the facial-recognition technology will look through those photos and suggest people to tag; anyone who is tagged will receive an email notification, with the option to untag themselves.
Find My Face will be rolling out in the next few days, Steiner said, but if it sounds familiar, you're not alone. Facebook in June, but from regulators for not adequately informing users that the service was going live. The social network apologized for not being transparent, but said the tool was simply intended to help users speed up a process that is "done more than 100 million times a day."
Earlier this year, there were reports that Google was developing a facial-recognition app, but . Several months later, the facial-recognition tech company Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, or PittPatt.
Google, however, has used facial-recognition technology in various capacities for some now. In 2008, it to Picasa using tech it acquired from the 2006 purchase of Neven. Like Find My Face, the Picasa tool prompts users to identify the people in uploaded photos, after which it starts suggesting tags for photos based on facial similarities.
Petrosky said today that face-detection tech is used for things like Google image search. When instructed to search for photos with faces, for example, a Google image search for "rice" will return photos of Condoleezza Rice or Anne Rice rather than a photo featuring grains of rice.
Facial recognition is also used with Street View to blur photos, and it to unlock phones in Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, Petrosky said.
Petrosky stressed that any facial-recognition technologies will be deployed "with strong privacy standards in place" and in a transparent manner.
Erin Egan, a senior policy advisor and director of privacy at Facebook, is scheduled to speak at the FTC forum around 3pm Eastern this afternoon; her appearance will be webcast.
In other Google+ news, meanwhile, Google added the ability to grow circles, filter emails and contacts by circles, update contact information, and share photos to Google+—all via Gmail and Contacts.