Mountain View, California — Following into the footsteps of popular social media leader Facebook, global search engine giant Google’s emerging social network dove into the sphere of facial recognition on Thursday, rolling out a new experimental feature dubbed as “Find My Face” for its Google+ social network that prompts other users to tag friends’ faces in the photos wherever they appear.
Unlike Facebook, which has accumulated the ire of privacy advocates, Google’s offering of facial recognition for its photos application on Google+ is an opt-in service that uses facial recognition for photo tagging, a move which should help keep the company out of hot water, is drawing praise from analysts and security researchers alike because it stands in stark contrast to the way Facebook initiated similar technology earlier this year.
The latest initiative, “Find My Face” announced by Google+ Photos engineering lead Matt Steiner, when selected prompts the user’s contacts to tag the user whenever his/her face appears in the photos. Also the user does get the option to accept or reject the tags.
When you choose “Find My Face” in Google+, whenever people you know post a photo to their Google+ account that has your mug in it, a prompt will appear. It boxes your face on the image and asks the poster, “Is this [your name]?”
“Around the holidays, many of us get together with friends and family, and if you are like me, you take lots of photos! Tagging those photos can be a lot of work. So today we are introducing ‘Find My Face’, an easier way to tag photos of yourself and your friends,” Steiner explained.
“By activating Find My Face, Google+ can prompt people you know to tag your face when it appears in photos. Of course, you have control over which tags you accept or reject, and you can turn the feature on or off in Google+ settings,” he added.
Judging from comments on the Google announcement, user reaction to the new feature has been overwhelmingly positive. “Nice! And I’m glad to see that it is not opted in by default,” wrote Patrik Johansson.
“I think it is awesome,” said another, Mark Hamilton. “I am going to go turn it on to play with the new toys.”
In a way, this feature would be analyzed with Facebook’s Photo Tag Suggest feature. Facebook unveiled its service as opt-out, which is why Google is trying to score points with privacy aficionados.
Find My Face feature is being revealed to Google Plus users gradually and so far there is no update on whether it would be available to the Google Plus app or not. For the Google Plus App for Android, Google has already offered the Instant Upload feature and adding the Find My Face would certainly make it a worthy.
Google Plus is a flourishing social network and the Google engineers are working to bring enough features with equal caution instead of just throwing them to the users. The move comes as Google works to streamline its business, closing extraneous projects such as Google Labs in order to better concentrate its efforts on the core competencies of advertising, search and – with the launch of Google+ – social networking.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment about whether Google looked at Facebook’s photo-tagging folly for guidance with the way it enforced Find My Face. However, sources familiar with Google’s thinking say the company has learned a lot from Facebook’s privacy shortcomings, which is why it is being careful with Find My Face.
With new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich programs and several APIs offered, we believe that Google indeed will further polish the Google+ app to make it equally compelling as the desktop version. Just in case you wish to try out the Google Plus app, get it from Android Market here.