Facebook's photo-sharing app Moments makes sharing and tagging friends' pictures much easier due to Facebook's facial recognition technology. However, the recently launched European and Canadian version do not contain this useful feature.
Moments, launched around a year ago in the US and some countries, utilizes Facebook's powerful facial recognition technology, reports The Verge. The US version of the app uses data from Facebook's enormous user picture database and, with Facebook's advanced facial recognition system, groups faces and places that it recognizes as the same. This results to a very user-friendly Moments experience, where the app gives suggestions for tagging the names of friends in a picture with a high accuracy.
However, the same high degree of accuracy in recognizing faces is not a very welcome feature in other parts of the world. Since the recognition of the people in the photos as well as its suggested tagging/linking to names of other Facebook users are done automatically, European and Canadian lawmakers are concerned that the advanced facial recognition feature violates basic privacy rights of its citizens. This is especially worrisome because citizens' consent is not a requirement in the process, notes BBC.
Facebook had to come up with a revised version to satisfy European and Canadian legal restrictions. The new Moment available in Canada and Europe has drastically reduced facial recognition abilities. The revised Moments app uses a technique called 'facial clustering' which is more compliant with privacy laws in Europe and Canada, according to Independent. While the new app still sends photos to Facebook's servers, these pictures are no longer stored and the comparison is said to be done in the phone itself, not on Facebook's computers.
Will Ruben, a product manager of Moments explained that the app was set up to address a common problem most people encounter, cases wherein people complain of not getting copies their pictures that their friends took of them. To date, 600 million photos have been shares using Moments, indicating the app's popularity among users.
Google has a similar photo-sharing app named Google Photos, a cloud-based app with facial recognition feature similar to Moments. The company is now facing a lawsuit in Illinois, reports IBTimes, where its facial recognition feature is alleged to be violating the state's privacy laws covering the collection and storage of biometrics data.
