Facebook announced Tuesday that it is expanding its facial recognition technology in the interest of user privacy. The tool will now be able to notify users when a picture of them is uploaded — regardless of whether or not they are tagged in it — based on whether the algorithm recognizes a user's face.
Facebook's head of privacy, Rob Sherman, told The Verge: "If someone posts a photo of you, you might not know about it. Now, the users can access the photo, and they can communicate to the person who posted it." Previously, Facebook would not flag the image for the untagged user, and any such photos would float along until the user in question stumbled upon it themselves, at which point they would be asked if they'd like to be tagged.
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