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Facebook trains self to recognize your face

Zuckerberg's internet knows what you look like

Facebook is adding face recognition, working to automatically provide tags for the photos you upload to Mark Zuckerberg's own private internet.

When you upload pics, Facebook's photo sharing service will seek to identify faces and suggest tags accordingly. It identifies faces using, yes, previously tagged photos.

According to Facebook, Facebookers add more than 100 million tags to photos each day, and with face recognition, the company hopes to make the process easier. "While tags are an essential tool for sharing important moments, many of you have said tagging photos can be a chore. (Like that time you had to tag your cousin and her fiancé over and over and over again in 64 different pictures of their engagement party, and then go back and tag the guests)," Facebook engineer Justin Mitchell said in a blog post.

"Now if you upload pictures from your cousin's wedding, we'll group together pictures of the bride and suggest her name. Instead of typing her name 64 times, all you'll need to do is click "Save" to tag all of your cousin's pictures at once. By making tagging easier than before, you're more likely to know right away when friends post photos."

The flip side is that it's kinda creepy when people start tagging you in their photos. Facebook offers a privacy setting that will prevent it from suggesting your name as a tag, but users will still be able to tag photos of you manually. You're always notified when you've been tagged, and you can remove tags whenever you like. You can only be tagged by your Facebook "friends."

The face recognition will be rolled out to US-based users over "the next few weeks." ®

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