Facebook can identify you even if you’re not looking

Just after reporting that Facebook will know how long you’ve been looking at a post, the head of artificial intelligence from the company claims that their facial recognition technology no longer needs to see people’s faces to identify them. Creepy?

The technology reportedly takes into consideration other clues in the photo when the face is not present (person turning back, passing by, etc).

“There are a lot of cues we use. People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back,” LeCun said, who leads the team. “For example, you can recognise Mark Zuckerberg very easily, because he always wears a gray T-shirt.”

Their group conducted a test using 40,000 Flickr images wherein the algorithm correctly identified people 86% of the time. The project is still on its experimental stage, but this could potentially mean that it could know that it was you even if you were just in the background of a photo, even when your face isn’t shown.

{Via}