“Using facial recognition to help the visually impaired or as a tool to identify and combat cyber harassment is notable, because the positive uses of facial recognition technology are pretty limited to fun and maybe authentication,” says Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University who studies privacy and data protection. “It’s interesting now to see different uses. We collectively need to watch that to see how it plays out.”

Many Facebook users will end up subjecting their photos to bulk face-recognition scanning for little personal benefit—simply making tagging slightly easier. And least the company seems to strike a decent balance between utility and privacy.

“They won’t identify you using face recognition to people who couldn’t identity you in real life, and that to me seems like the right line,” says Chris Calabrese, vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “I personally am comfortable with face tagging in this very circumscribed context, but only in that context where it’s to someone who would already recognize you. If we cross that line, face recognition could rapidly spin out of control and that could be really problematic.”

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com