Google's Find My Face

Online, December 15, 2011 (Newswire.com) - This holiday season, Google is all set to launch its facial recognition application known as "Find My Face" for its social networking site Google+.

The trend of tagging people in group photos has been quite old. It gained prominence with the popularity of Facebook, who enabled this photo tagging feature in the summer of 2011.

Google's Matt Steiner, who has been the head this project, claims that this software will be very different from the one used by their arch rival, Facebook.

Unlike Facebook, Find My Face will come with an on and off option. It will give users the option of turning it on or off. Once the button is turned on, your friends will have the liberty of tagging you in their photos. However, if you are not keen about exposing your personal life on social networking sites, then you can turn this button off, which will save you from all kinds of unwanted attention.

The best part of Find My Face lies in the fact that, even if you keep your tagging options on, it gives you the option of accepting or rejecting any tags. This extra security measure has been incorporated by Google to ensure that user's privacy is not beached under any circumstances. The option of accepting or rejecting any tags is not present in Facebook which makes it a vulnerable target for hackers.

This announcement from Google has surprised many industry insiders, because Google, in their earlier statements, has claimed that they do not wish to implement any face recognition application in their website. However, later on Google went on to purchase a facial recognition company known as Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition. After this purchase, the launch of this application seems to be the only logical conclusion.

Google's photo tagging application is undoubtedly more superior than Facebook's application. Now it remains to be seen how Facebook counteracts Google and improves its own photo tagging application, which is filled with many structural flaws since its inception.