The facial recognition site Face.com indexed 7 billion photos in the last year and has over 52 million faces identified with its photo tagging and photo search applications on Facebook.

Face.com is expanding its reach to include the entire web by offering a developer option that lets users embed the facial recognition software on any site.

The site’s Photo Finder lets you find pictures of yourself or friends that are untagged and their Photo Tagger lets people collect face pics that can then be tagged with names.

Face.com has become a hit with Facebook users since the social network is now the web’s largest photo-sharing site, with nearly 2 billion photos per month being added.

Their facial recognition tool is even accurate enough to identify faces in pictures that were taken in bad lighting with poor focus. People wearing eyeglasses, hiding under facial hair and even people in costumes can be accurately identified by Face.com.

Face.com claims to use the same privacy protection policies that Facebook uses, which doesn’t do much to alleviate privacy concerns.

Other facial recognition software on the market includes Apple’s iPhoto software, Google’s Picasa, and Polar Rose.

The video below provides an nice overview of how Face.com apps are used on Facebook -

[ Source: VentureBeat.com ]

Here is some Google news that is sure to make the privacy advocates bolt their doors and lower their blinds.

The top brass at Google is discussing the possible use of facial recognition technology.

Google currently uses facial recognition tools on their Picasa picture sharing site. The tool allows users to name people in their photos and then searches and finds other pictures where the same faces appear.

So far Google has not used facial recognition software for other search services. For instance, Google has not used facial recognition in their Google Goggles service. Google Goggles lets people search for something on the web by taking a picture of it with a mobile phone.

Privacy advocates are concerned that using facial recognition in Google Goggles searches would allow people to track strangers by simply taking a picture of them and running an internet search on it. This could potentially turn the technology into a dream come true for stalkers and identity thieves.

However, Google is facing competition from other facial recognition services like Face.com that are already pushing into this area of tech.

Google has recently been stung by revelations that their street view cameras gathered information from unsecured WiFi connections during the past several years. This is giving the company pause over the possible use of facial recognition technology in their search areas.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that the collection of WiFi data did not cause any measurable harm to users. He said Google would do more to educate people about privacy concerns.

The genie is out of the bottle on this one. If Google doesn’t offer this technology to users, someone else will. The question is whether or not Google wants to take the blame if the technology is ever misused, which, like all technology, it inevitably will be.

Facial web searches of people will happen, its just a question of time and service provider.

[ Source: FT.com ]

This short video from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is one of the best, no-hype informational videos on social networks, privacy and personal information that I have seen.

Watch the video and think about the many ways social network and social media sites can use, repackage and redistribute your personal information.

Facebook passed the 500 million visitor mark in the month of April, according to ComScore.

ComScore’s site traffic measurements show Facebook in fourth place with 519 million visits in April. Google was in first place with 921 million users. Microsoft landed in second-place with 728 million and Yahoo came in fourth with 588 million.

ComScore’s site traffic numbers include non-registered site visitors who can view Facebook pages through public profiles.

Facebook has recently seen crititicism over its complex and ever-changing privacy practices as well as new services that share its user data with other social media sites.

The ComScore traffic rankings are from April. The growing controversy over Facebook privacy policies started in May, so it’s possible that the social network could have a slowdown in traffic as a result.

However, traffic data from Hitwise tracks site visitors on a weekly basis and hasn’t recorded a drop in Facebook traffic. Facebook’s US traffic has been growing around 3% per week for the three weeks since the privacy problems hit the news, which is in line with its the weekly traffic growth from earlier this year.

In the past, Facebook’s traffic continued to grow despite privacy concerns.

Continued growth in Facebook’s registered users would support the company claim that people aren’t worried about changes to the privacy policy.

Facebook believes people are using the new social networking features in spite of the privacy criticisms.

Facebook has had world-wide traffic growth of 69% from last year.

Over 75% of Facebook visitors are from outside the U.S.

The U.S. has over 115 million registered Facebook users.

In the past year, Facebook has had its strongest growth rates in Latin America ( 102% ) and Europe ( 74% ).

User growth in the United States is still strong at at 83% since last year.

[ Source: WSJ.com ]

The hysteria over the Spokeo people search engine has really reached a fevered pitch, with politicians, attorneys general and news media fanning the flames.

I have done numerous people searches on the Spokeo site and, aside from some obvious accuracy issues in the data, I have found nothing that causes me privacy concerns.

It is humorous to see people get worked up over some of their information appearing on people search sites like Spokeo; when some of these same people have no problem telling all about themselves on Facebook and other social networks, in addition to posting compromising pictures of themselves and friends online.

The video below shows Brad Phelps, Chief Deputy for the Arkansas Attorney General’s Office, discussing the Spokeo issue. He initially infers that social security number information is available on the site, until the reporter questions him further on it.

He finally, reluctantly, admits that the information found on the Spokeo site is probably not illegal. No kidding, it is all over the internet on various public record, people search and social networking sites. However, when one web service aggregates it and makes it searchable, it is somehow the end of privacy as we know it.

The privacy hysteria continues…