Facebook—now cash-rich after its recent IPO—continues its buying spree, this time picking up Face.com, an Israeli company specializing in face recognition technology. Although Facebook is yet to confirm the price, most industry experts are pegging the deal somewhere at 60 million dollars.
Facebook evidently is beefing up its arsenal, and after including photo-sharing capabilities—courtesy Instagram, which it bought for a whopping 1 billion dollars—now wants to be able to recognize every profile by face. An immediate impact this will have is on photo tagging, which was an interesting feature but seriously lacked relevance. Facebook released an official statement saying, “People who use Facebook enjoy sharing photos and memories with their friends, and Face.com’s technology has helped to provide the best photo experience.”
The pros and cons mentioned below are tackled from both Facebook and its user’s perspective:
Con: Privacy Concerns?
Being able to identify 900 million active users by face is no small deal, and it’s too early to say how far-reaching the consequences can be. However, voices are already being raised over privacy issues: Facebook, which earlier came under fire for its lopsided approach to privacy settings in user profiles, needs to be very careful in how it uses all this data.
Facebook’s page on photo tagging will help you understand how to control the visibility of the photos you are tagged in and how to remove tags which might be little complicated for few. As tagging feature is also allowed in business pages too, marketers needs to be careful about their customer’s privacy.
Pros: What Does Facebook Achieve?
- In any case, this acquisition is really interesting as the world will wait and watch how cutting-edge technology changes the way we connect online and this acquisition will definitely help mobile users to make the photo tagging process easier not just this, most of the Facebook users love sharing photos and memories with their friends and this integration will just add on the experience.
- Acquiring Face.com also brings Facebook a world-class team and a long-time technology vendor in house.
- The domain name Face.com itself is a interesting deal all together, this could be the main reason of purchase too. In future, this will avoid misdirected traffic and since timeline features enables one to show their credible history right from the birth, Face.com can be a apt name for this social networking site now after all it has become a identity for many.
- As many developers are associated with Face.com technology to power various app and make wonderful products, Acquiring Face.com also acquires the interest of their developer’s community.
Do you have any other opinion? I would love to hear.
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