In a move to open up opportunities, the social network site, Facebook.com bought Face.com, an Israeli company, that specializes in facial recognition software.
Face.com has already released 2 facebook apps, the first, called photo finder, scans untagged pictures of themselves and friends and photo tagger, which allows a user to tag pictures in bulk.
Although the apps may seem convenient to some, facial recognition software has raised flags with privacy groups and other people that don’t want their privacy invaded and potentially fall into the hands of those who could abuse it, like corporations or the state. Matching a face to a name and then a person’s entire background could be used to achieve a society under complete surveillance every time they leave their home and a camera picks up their image, in a store, on the street, or in this instance, where they were and who they were with, when a photo was taken. As this technology advances, expect to see more and more law enforcement agencies using it to track every citizen, associate you with other people and associate the people within a certain area of a crime that’s taken place.
This is especially troubling because Facebook recently bought the popular app called Instagram, which allows users to take photos with their phones, add filters to achieve certain effects, tag people, geotag the location of the photograph and then share the photograph with other Instagram users (which boasted 30 million accounts in April, before the Android app was available).
Face.com is backed by Yandex NV, Russia’s most-used search engine, and investing firm Rhodium.
Alas, Facebook is not the first to use facial recognition technology. Google‘s Picasa, Apple’s iPhoto, Sony’s Picture Motion Browser and Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery already use similar software.
Facebook’s stock rose 4.7 percent in trading today, but still falling 17 percent short of it’s projected value.
And don’t bother deleting your pictures from any of these services, they’ve already been crawled most likely and if not the FBI has been using this technology for awhile.
The image above represents a study done by Adam Harvey in which makeup is used to disguise ones face. The faces with red square are ones that were identified by facial recognition software. This may be out of date. read more: http://gajitz.com/about-face-defeat-face-recognition-software-with-makeup/
wastingtheendtimes 
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