Facebook Photos Can Now Be Found Without Being Tagged, Another Privacy Breach?

Facebook users can usually look for photos of themselves on other people’s accounts by simply searching for tags or keywords used on those photos. Now, the social media site has made changes, which will allow users to find pictures by simply having an AI analyze and identify the people or objects within the images. Could this be another privacy breach issue?

According to the blog post that the company put up to announce the new changes, Facebook is applying new AI technology in order to analyze photos via individual pixels. This will, therefore, allow users to find certain photos about people or events without having to be tagged on the photos or even being in them.

As Joaquin Candela, the applied machine learning director at Facebook explains in the post, photos used to be only discoverable if there were enough relevant tags. With the new pixel-based image analysis, this is no longer the case.

“That's changing because we've pushed computer vision to the next stage with the goal of understanding images at the pixel level,” the post reads. “This helps our systems do things like recognize what's in an image, what type of scene it is, if it's a well-known landmark, and so on. This, in turn, helps us better describe photos for the visually impaired and provide better search results for posts with images and videos.”

Facebook also added that the new technology could help the social media site better determine any content that it deems inappropriate, Fortune reports. The social network has been stepping up its efforts to crack down on some of the content going through user newsfeeds including fake news and any image that would be in violation of the site’s regulations.

However, as good as all of these features might be, it doesn’t take away the fact that users don’t even need to be tagged on photos in order to be found anymore. What about users who don’t like to be tagged explicitly so that they won’t be found? It would seem these people no longer have a choice in the matter.