Monday, October 16, 2017

When Facebook Thinks You're Someone Else...


Last week I snapped a picture of my daughter at her weekend job. She did what I did last year and the year before that, worked as part of the Hackenslash show at Lagoon's Frightmares. After our shifts ended I used the picture as my "Pic Of The Day," It was when I downloaded it to Facebook that things got interesting.

If you're unfamiliar with Facebook, you can download all sorts of things, pictures, videos, clips from movies, artwork. It's almost limitless. And the good people of Facebook have added another handy feature--they've set up a face-recognition feature so you can identify people in your photos. I imagine the reason for this is multi-fold. When a person "tags" another person in a photo, a message goes out to the tagged person as well as all their Facebook Friends. That way as many people as possible will then checkout the new picture, thus staying on their website and avoiding others. Like cars, you can only drive one at a time--you can only be on one website at a time.


I downloaded the picture and I got a familiar notice. Facebook asked if I wanted to "Tag" my son. The problem is, the picture wasn't of my son, but of my daughter. Except for two years when my son was on a church mission, I've lived with both these children all their lives. I guess there's a resemblance, but I don't think they look a like. In Facebook's defense, my daughter was not on Facebook at the time and my son was.

This changed today. My daughter now has her own Facebook account so I wondered if Facebook would recognize that the picture of my daughter I posted last week was not my son. I pulled up the picture and clicked the "Tag" option. Turns out the book of faces still didn't recognize the correct person. I'm not smart enough to understand Facebook's recognition software--I'm sure it's very technical. Just not this time...

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