Facebook’s legal team made a Hail Mary last week to delay its biometric class action lawsuit, and it has now scored a touchdown: A panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to review whether the lawsuit really should qualify for class action status. The decision essentially pauses the judicial proceedings…
Facebook is providing more information to users about new facial recognition features of the social media platform that were first announced at the end of last year. The features are designed to automatically detect when pictures of a user are uploaded to the platform without their knowledge, or when their image is used as a…
Facebook has acquired a facial biometrics startup called FacioMetrics. The startup was founded only last year by students at Carnegie Mellon, and offers machine learning technology designed to analyze faces in real time. The technology allows for filter effects like face-swapping and dog noses to be superimposed onto images of a subject’s face, similar to…
“The system takes advantage of facial recognition technology to compare a registrant’s selfie against images from other social media, the user’s driver license, and other public records.” Facebook has only just launched its online trading Marketplace, and a third-party seller verification tool has already emerged. Called Trust Stamp, it’s designed to make sure that sellers are…
Your face can be replicated in a virtual model and used for biometric authentication, suggests new research from a University of North Carolina team. As Wired reports, the researchers showed how this can be done at the recent Usenix security conference. They looked up digital images of volunteers on social networks such as Facebook and…
A Russian app that searches a popular social networking site to match faces to smartphone photos is proving increasingly popular in its home country. Called FindFace, the app was recently highlighted in an art project that used it to match pictures of Moscow subway riders to their profiles on the VKontakte social network. It’s based on…
Facebook has launched a new facial recognition feature to its Facebook Messenger app. Called Photo Magic, the system scans through a user’s camera roll to identify pictures featuring the user’s friends, and then prompts the user with the option of sending those photos to the featured friends. It’s designed to capitalize on a major trend…
Facebook has filed a motion to have a potential class action lawsuit against the company dismissed. The lawsuit was filed over the company’s collection and storage of individuals’ facial biometric data. The company pursues these biometric activities in the service of its ‘tag suggestions’ feature, which is designed to automatically identify the faces of people…
Privacy advocates continue to sound warnings about Facebook’s collection of biometric data. The concerns have mostly been brought about by the social media company’s use of facial recognition technology on users. Speaking to Bloomberg, an attorney with privacy rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed to the company’s lack of transparency about the practice as the key…
Facebook has launched a facial recognition feature that can automatically tag faces in photos, according to a MailOnline article by Victoria Woollaston. The feature, called DeepFace, can reportedly identify individuals’ faces with 97.25 percent accuracy. The technology was initially developed by an Israeli company called face.com, which was purchased by Facebook in 2013. From there…
Facebook has purchased a voice recognition startup and may add it to its arsenal of technologies gathering data on its users. The acquisition, reported last month in a Wall Street Journal article by Reed Albergotti, saw the social network giant buy Wit.ai for an undisclosed amount. The most obvious uses of Wit.ai’s technology would be…