Facebook panders to European privacy concerns by stripping facial recognition from Moments app
Facebook has rolled out its photo-sharing app Moments around the world, and users in Europe have been treated to a modified version. Specifically, the European version of the app lacks the facial recognition feature that allows for automatic tagging of people.
In many ways, Facebook has been forced to release a degraded version of Moments to its EU audience because of the varying privacy laws that exist in different countries. The hobbled app will not attempt to identify individuals in photos, but will group together images that "appear to include the same face".
Rather than relying on more familiar facial recognition, Facebook says this feature is driven by a type of object recognition. This uses statistics such as the distance between eyes to identify matches, but the task of actually tagging people falls to the user.
The updated version of Moments -- available for iOS and Android -- prompts the user to name individuals in photos. Facebook stresses that tags or labels are only stored privately rather than being shared with anyone else.
The privacy-focused version of the app is available in both Europe and Canada, but it would not be surprising to see it spread to other parts of the world as well. In the US, the social network is facing legal challenges over its photo tagging techniques.
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