Facebook thinks my young daughter is a man named Bill. It’s true. I shared a photo recently of her enjoying a homemade waterslide at our family fish fry with her cousins – she was having a blast. When I uploaded the picture, it suggested tagging my daughter as my friend Bill. No, Facebook. That’s funny, but no thanks. I posted it and moved on.
A little later, another friend of mine took a screenshot of the image with the same question. Facebook was just certain that was Bill in the photo and it needed someone to validate its guess. It’s a good thing I have a sense of humor and along with my friends we can laugh it off. Some people are not so pleased by this issue.
But really, how much more amazing can technology get? I mean, folks! We are living the future. Our phones and our cars respond to some of our most basic needs. Your Roku and DVR hold the place where you were last watching a show. There are 3D printers that are actually printing hearts to be used for transplants. What? It’s all so breathtaking.
Ultimately, the goal of technology is to make the lives of us plebeians easier. Brilliant people are coming up with unprecedented advancements every single day that help us to do the most common tasks as swiftly and as effortlessly as possible. Facial recognition is one such technology.
Facial recognition has been around for a while in one form or another, but was tested by the US government post 9/11 to look out for terrorist activity at larger events. Banks are starting to implement the technology at their ATM’s as additional identification. The FBI is set to launch a brand new FR system called Next Generation Identification (NGI) that complies a millions of photos from a central government database that will be launched in all 50 states by year-end. These are seriously important ways to use this technology.
And then there’s Facebook. Facebook’s facial recognition system, DeepFace, is pretty incredible and it has made the all too important job of tagging your friends in that float trip photo extremely easy. Heck, their names pop right up! What’s more, the word on the street is that Facebook’s FR system surpasses the FBI’s.
For every one suspect, NGI spits out 50 images to potential matches and promises an 85 percent chance of a match. Given two images, DF can tell you with 97 percent accuracy that the images include the same person.
That 97 percent does leave some room for errors. Sweet, sweet hilarious, errors. Of course, Buzzfeed has a list of facial recognition errors. Here are a few of my faves:
Don’t want Facebook to suggest that you’re the identical twin to the floor of a basketball court? Here’s how to change your settings:
1) Once you’re logged in, go to your settings by clicking on the triangle to the left of the lock at the top right of the page.
2) On the left hand side, you will see the words, “Timeline and Tagging.” Click on that.
3) There is a section devoted to tagging and tagging suggestions. Choose which option works best for you.
How about you? What are your best Facebook facial recognition fails?