Facebook will employ face recognition software to make tagging easier (Credit: Facebook) 
 
 Just a few hours after Time magazine anointed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg "Person of the Year," Zuckerberg's company announced yet another new service that will attempt to recognize pictures of your friends based on their facial characteristics. 
 
 Starting next week, Facebook will start using face recognition technology to assist its users in tagging pictures of friends. 
 
 Privacy Remains the Same 
 
 Facebook officials told me that the new service will not change the privacy settings related to tagging -- users will still get a notice if they are tagged and can remove the tag of any photos. Also, users continue to have control over who tags them. 
 
 Another comforting fact about the new tagging service is that it's not automatic. When you upload an album, Facebook will attempt to recognize the people in it. If it finds what it thinks is a match it will ask you to confirm. If you do nothing, the photo won't be tagged. 
 
 As has long been the case with photos, you will only be able to tag people you are friends with and, presumably to improve accuracy, Facebook will only compare the pictures against a relatively small sub-set of your friends -- perhaps as few as the 30 people you communicate with most often, which, according to computer scientists who study face recognition, can improve the accuracy. 
 
 Facebook will also be allowing users to opt-out of having their name suggested to friends during the photo tagging process. If you disable "Suggest photos of me to friends," your name will "no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually," according to the Facebook blog. 
 
 From a privacy standpoint this move should have little impact but it is yet one more example of how Facebook is encouraging people to share information, including photos 
 
 Hard to Do 
 
 Face recognition remain hard to do said Erick Learned-Miller, an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts whose research includes "machine learning" and "computer vision. And it's especially difficult if you're using a very large database. "The larger the number of people you are trying to identify, the more difficult the problem" he said in an interview. 
 
 "Up to now the reliability of face recognition is not very good," he said. "if you could be right more than half the time that would be very very good." 
 
 Learned-Miller calls Facebook's plan to allow the user to confirm whether the photograph is accurately identified "makes a lot of sense," referring to the process as a "human in the loop method where you don't commit to a particular decision but you try to use the computer as a screen step that improves your own efficiency." 
 
 It also helps that Facebook can take advantage of previous tagging. If a person has been tagged in multiple photographs, that improves the chances of it working, according to computer scientists I spoke with. 
 
 Rolling Out Gradually 
 
 Facebook will roll out the service to a small number of users next week and expand from there. It will initially only be available in the United States. 
 
 This announcement follows one in September when Facebook announced group tagging, an improved photo viewer and higher-resolution images. More than 100 million photos are uploaded daily, according to Facebook officials. 
 
 Larry Magid is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from several technology companies including Facebook. 
 
 
 
 Follow Larry Magid on Twitter: www.twitter.com/larrymagid ||||| Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) quiet introduction of facial recognition for its photos application on Google+ is drawing praise from analysts and security researchers alike because it stands in stark contrast to the way Facebook employed similar technology earlier this year. 
 
 That is, it's opt-in. Google's Find My Face feature lets its Google+ social network users opt-in to photo tagging. When users opt-in to Find My Face, the next time one of their Google+ contacts adds a photo they're in, they'll see their name as a suggested tag. Users will receive a tag prompt can accept or reject any instance where someone wants to tag them. 
 
 "Despite the fact that I am not comfortable with my information being gathered in this manner, providing people with a choice is never a bad thing," wrote Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at security software provider Sophos Canada. "It is up to every individual to make an *informed* choice about how their personal information is shared and asking their permission is the right approach." 
 
 If Find My Face sounds familiar it's because Facebook already beat Google to such a feature called Tag Suggestions, which automatically detects users in photos and links them with their names so that users don't have to manually tag friends. 
 
 The tool was actually announced a year ago, but some of Facebook's 800 million-plus users forgot about it. As Facebook gradually rolled Tag Suggestions out in 2011, it drew the ire of enough users for not advising them the feature had been turned on. People can be quite self-conscious about tagged photos because they can provide contextual information that users may want to keep private. 
 
 Privacy and U.S. Congressmen took notice. Last June, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Connecticut state Attorney General George Jepsen complained that Facebook should have provided more notice and should instead make the feature opt-in. Facebook then made the tool easier to opt out of, but it's still an opt-out feature. 
 
 A Google spokesperson declined to comment about whether Google looked at Facebook's photo-tagging folly for guidance with the way it implemented Find My Face. However, sources familiar with Google's thinking say the company has learned a lot from Facebook's privacy foibles, which is why it's being careful with Find My Face. 
 
 Google also learned a lot from its own social software privacy gaffe. Nearly two years ago, it launched Google Buzz, a social service that exposed its users Gmail contacts to other people. The company quickly altered the service but took a major hit to its reputation for preserving user data and trust. 
 
 Altimeter Group analyst Rebecca Lieb called Google's implementation of Find My Face a very smart move at a time when the company is trying to challenge Facebook for the hearts, minds and eyeballs of social network users. 
 
 "Google is not interested in making the same mistakes Facebook made," Lieb told eWEEK, adding that even creating the perception that they care about user privacy can go along with consumers. "They are ensuring users they have their privacy interests in mind." 
 
 The launch of Find My Face as an opt-in facial recognition tool conveniently came the same day the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a privacy workshop where it said it would take a hard line against companies that violate consumer privacy using facial recognition technology. ||||| At left: The photo we sent Three Day Rule. At right: The facial match they sent back. (TDR) 
 
 The headlines read like a synopsis for Spike Jonze’s next romantic drama: In the approximate future — in a strangely pastel L.A. — romantic loss will simply cease to exist! That’s because Match.com is rolling out facial recognition technology that can find you a clone of your ex. An exact lookalike. A twin. For $5,000, in short, you never have to move on. 
 
 It’s a wildly catchy narrative, mostly because it plays into prevalent fears and confusions about how facial recognition — and big data — work. Facebook can now, we’re told, recognize faces as well as the human brain. All-seeing, inscrutable algorithms on Google know us better than we know ourselves. 
 
 This Match partnership is additionally uncanny, because it implies that technology can somehow erode individual identity — make us interchangeable, even on the most intimate level. It’s a concern that sites like Match and OkCupid kind of fan already. 
 
 It’s also a concern that, in this case, is probably a bit overblown. 
 
 “I mean, I understand where people are getting that from,” said Talia Goldstein, the CEO of the company partnering with Match on this facial recognition tool. But in practice she says, the tool is actually based on a very intuitive, old-school, and not particularly sinister logic: “‘ Attractive’ means different things to different people.” 
 
 Goldstein’s high-end matchmaking agency, Three Day Rule, is actually a pretty conventional operation, as far as these things go. A former producer on E’s “True Hollywood Stories,” Goldstein quit her day job four years ago to pursue a budding hobby: setting up her lovelorn co-workers and friends. For a fee of $5,000, clients bought a lengthy personal interview with Goldstein and six months of curated matches with men or women her company sought out. (Under the Match partnership, the same fee structure will apply: Match users can, for free, opt-in to Three Day Rule’s database, where they’re eligible to be paired with Three Day Rule clients; or, for $5,000, they can become clients themselves — a package that entails six months of date-finding and screening by a professional matchmaker.) 
 
 Starting out, Goldstein always asked the usual questions: What personality traits are you looking for? Do you care about height? Education? Career? But she also asked clients to supply Facebook photos of their exes, just so she could see herself the types of people they were attracted to. Sometimes there was a range or a mixed bag; but generally, the stack of photos had some vague commonality — a hair color, for instance, or a particular face shape. Goldstein would include those notes as she looked for potential matches. 
 
 “If you look at photos of your exes all together — and you should play this game — you’ll notice some traits that look the same,” she said. Which is, of course, just a fancy way of saying that different people find different things good-looking. 
 
 As Goldstein’s company grew, that kind of manual photo-browsing became more arduous. She launched an online component, with all the user photos in a database. She licensed a facial recognition program that allowed Three Day Rules’ matchmakers to tag user photos as blonde or brunette, round-faced or oval-faced, deep-set eyes or prominent ones. Eventually the program could input those basic tags on its own. 
 
 Now, Goldstein says, the software essentially does three things: It identifies the hair color, face shape, eye shape and eyebrow structure of the person in the photo; it searches those tags against a database of user photos that have been similarly tagged; and it spits out a collection of approximate matches — which professional matchmakers can then check for other prerequisites, like education level or salary. At no point, Goldstein stresses, are they ever looking for — or finding! — “clones” of an ex-flame. 
 
 To test that, I sent Goldstein photos of three male friends and asked her to run them through her firm’s facial recognition program. She couldn’t run my photos against her actual user database, out of privacy concerns, but she agreed to run them against a database of World Cup player photos. As a demonstration of the software, the results are pretty uncanny. 
 
 But in the context of online dating, they don’t strike me as all that weird. Goldstein is quick to point out that her algorithms are human-mediated: Yes, a facial-recognition program cuts the dating pool from, say, 10,000 to 100, but a real live matchmaker then goes through to check things like personality and career and salary range. Compare that to the impenetrable cocktail of algorithms at play on other dating sites — where matches are made based on clicks, quizzes and cold probabilities — and it almost seems less ominous. In fact, while sites like Match and OkCupid and their ilk are pretty hush-hush about what goes into their formulas, it’s pretty safe to assume that they’re inferring your “type,” physical and otherwise, based on the user profiles you show interest in. 
 
 That’s not exactly the same thing, of course: There’s something about facial-recognition specifically that gives us the heebie-jeebies. But in actual matchmaking practice, Three Day Rule isn’t using that algorithm any differently than other popular dating sites use matching algorithms already. 
 
 Yeah, it sounds intuitively “creepy” to look for dates based on your exes. But maybe this algorithm only strikes us as creepier than others because it’s the only one we can actually see.
– Get ready for another Facebook update: Next week, the site will start rolling out new face-recognition technology for photos, the Huffington Post reports. It’s “comforting” to know that the service won’t be automatic, writes Larry Magid. If the site thinks it recognizes someone, it will ask you for confirmation. Ignore it, and no tagging takes place. Privacy settings won’t change—you’ll still be alerted when you’re tagged and able to remove any unwanted tags. You’ll also be able to opt out of the service, meaning the site won’t try to recognize you in your friends’ pictures. Face-recognition technologies are still fairly unreliable, says an expert; perhaps for that reason, Facebook will attempt to identify only those of your friends you contact the most. Meanwhile, the site is expected to generate $2 billion in revenue this year, insiders tell Bloomberg.