Facebook Can See... Faces

Facebook is officially smart enough to place a user's name with their face.

The Palo Alto, Calif. social media giant announced this week its adding facial recognition technology to its photo sharing service. The facial recognition technology will be called tag suggestions, and will can automatically tell if the photo is of a particular person, as long as that person has been tagged in a photo beforehand.

When you or a friend upload new photos, we use face recognition software-similar to that found in many photo editing tools-to match your new photos to other photos you're tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos, Facebook engineer Justin Mitchell said in a blog post.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company did not have many details to share regarding the technology itself other than that some of it was built in-house and some licensed. She said it's a standard technology similar to Picasa or iPhoto.

Facebook says its privacy settings allow for people to disable being suggested in tags. The company said it will begin to launch the facial recognition technology over the next few weeks.

Over the past year, the company has made several adjustments to its photo sharing service. For one, it has allowed higher resolution photos to be uploaded increasing the capacity from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels. They also enabled group tagging. This allows users to tag multiple photos in the same album all at once. This means users can tag photos of the same person without having to do it multiple times.