I can find your picture on Facebook, even though you were not tagged

A new facebook application, face.com, applies face recognition to pictures in Facebook. The application process the tags of your pictures and your friends’ pictures, and goes off and tries to find more pictures, even though they are not tagged. For example, the application found these untagged pictures of me:
My face, recognized by face.com

Face.com is surprisingly accurate. I encountered just a handful of false positives (pictures which were auto-tagged as friends, even though they were not). I imagine that it uses the social network as a way to reenforce tagging. Let us imagine that X is a friend of Y, but not a friend of Z, and that a face classifier had classified someone appearing in the same picture with X as either Y or Z with even probabilities. Therefore, there is a higher probability of the classified person to be Y, as he is X’s friend.

However, there this technology raises a disturbing concern for privacy. Until now, people could have some control over their pictures in Facebook by untagging themselves. Now, they can’t. Also, the algorithm searches through pictures by people who are not necessarily your friends. For example, friends of your friends. This means that it is very easy for your friends to find pictures of you have no control over, and not even be aware of. This is just my imagination, though. It is m wild speculation, though, I do not really know.

It is time for Facebook to give you more control over pictures of you. As untagging is not enough anymore, Facebook should let users remove pictures in which you are tagged, even though you did not upload it yourself.

9 Responses to “I can find your picture on Facebook, even though you were not tagged”


  1. 1 gi July 30, 2010 at 10:04 am

    i’ve seen a picture from album of friend in facebook..i tagged it.but i cant see it anymore..what can i do.?where i can find it?

  2. 2 gi July 30, 2010 at 10:07 am

    teach me how to find the picture i tagged from a friends album on facebook

  3. 3 sontravia nelson September 29, 2010 at 8:01 pm

    hey i need a facebook for a game its called social star and im playing it and it keeps on telling me to go on facebook for the game. help me please ok just help me how to put it on the game thank you.

  4. 4 cstrouse1966@yahoo.com February 2, 2011 at 8:17 am

    My frien has me blocked from his taged pictures on facebook, how can I see them?

  5. 5 cstrouse1966@yahoo.com February 2, 2011 at 8:19 am

    How can i see my friends facebook tags and pictures if he has me blocked from seeing them?

  6. 8 Anonymous March 15, 2012 at 10:56 pm

    Yal don’t got swag

  7. 9 KORPOH March 31, 2012 at 12:58 pm

    i love your programmer


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About this Blog

This blog is a place for half-baked ideas about research, computers, robots, AI, and whatever. My name is Eran Toch, and I am a an assistant prof. at Tel Aviv University. For more info, see my homepage.

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