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Facebook's Newest Privacy Problem: 'Faceprint' Data (cnet.com)
Katie Collins, reporting for CNET: Facebook knows you so well these days that it can recognize you just by seeing your face. You may not have a problem with this, but that doesn't mean it's all good in the eyes of the law. The social network lost the first round of a lawsuit on Thursday in which it is accused of "unlawfully" storing biometric data mined from people's photographs. The company was seeking to have the suit dismissed, but a federal judge in California rejected the request. Facebook taps into its photo-tagging system to build up a geometric representation of people's faces to create something called a faceprint for each of its users. Faceprints are then used to suggest tags for people when new photos are uploaded to the network. One could argue that the clue is in the name, but many Facebook users probably don't know that they agree to having data about their face stored when they sign up.
IIRC when it recognizes a face (or a face like shape) it offers users to tag that person, and I think the tag has to be of an existing facebook user, possibly in your friends or friends-of-friends...
But my immediate thought is "what would it take to poison the data". IE, if you can tag your friends, and you have a large enough group of 'em, could you repeatedly tag similar photos (of say, yourself) with different names enough to "muddy the print" ?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
"but many Facebook users probably don't know that they agree to having data about their face stored when they sign up."
That's probably because MILLIONS of people signed up for facebook long before facebook even conceived the idea of doing so.
No you can tag a face with any "name" you want. I do it to all sorts of people in pictures just to confuse facebook. I also like it when facebook screws the pooch and finds a face when there isn't one. According to facebook my face looks like one of these as it was really good at finding faces in mariposa lilies. I even got my friends to do it once I discovered it. I also apparently look like George Washington on Mt. Rushmore.
Time to offend someone
I don't use Facebook. That doesn't stop my friends from tagging my face when I'm in one of their photos which they post on Facebook.
This whole face recognition thing started as a useful tool - software can automatically add keyword tags to photos. So if you want to show someone the funny picture you took of Joe at the Grand Canyon on your 25th birthday, you can search for "Joe" "Grand Canyon" and "2009" and it'll return a dozen pics for you sift through, instead of of the thousands of pics on your HDD.
But when they started using it to figure out who knows whom based on how many photos they showed up in together, that's when it changed from useful tool to creepy stalker.