Facebook could help people 'recognize' strangers

Facebook's photo database could be used in a mobile application designed to recognize people on the streets, the Cnet web site reported on Friday. During the Black Hat computer security conference held on August 3-4 in Las Vegas, one of the speakers, Carnegie Mellon University researcher Alessandro Acquisti, presented the idea of the face-matching technology. Acquisti said that he had assembled a database of about 25,000 students' Facebook photographs. Then he took the photos of the volunteers on the campus. The facial recognition software came up with the names of over 30 percent of the students after about three-second processing time. "Facial visual searches may become as common as today's text-based searches," Cnet quoted Acquisti as saying. The web site said that Carnegie Mellon researchers had also designed an iPhone app that can take a photograph of someone and after processing it via special software display the person's name and basic information about them. In early June, Facebook launched a face recognition technology which allows tagging of friends in photos by matching a picture to a database of faces. It immediately raised discussions about privacy violations.