Facebook Introduces a Facial Recognition Tool

Facial recognition has increasingly become a part of our lives—just ask anyone who has an iPhone X. 

But Facebook's recently announced facial recognition technology isn't designed to give users access to their accounts. Instead, the tool lets users manage how they appear on the site. 

Facebook will notify you when other users upload a picture of you even if they don't tag you in it. Previously, if someone you aren't friends with uploaded a picture of you and didn't tag you, you'd have no way of knowing that new picture of you is on social media. 

The facial recognition technology is built off of the same algorithm that offers suggestions for who to tag in your photos.

"Our technology analyzes the pixels in photos you’re already tagged in and generates a string of numbers we call a template. When photos and videos are uploaded to our systems, we compare those images to the template," said Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook.

This new measure could be helpful in preventing and stopping cases of fraud, particularly Catfishing.

The tool won't work retroactively, however. So there could be unknown photos of you on the site. But from now on, expect to have a greater knowledge of how your image is being used on Facebook.