Facebook, the app Moments for facial recognition will not come … – The Messenger

The European guarantors of privacy facial recognition just not convincing. And so the last application of Facebook, which is based on this technology to identify friends in your photos and share with them the clicks, for the moment will not arrive in Europe.

The green light changes from a change in the app, which will ask users explicit consent to use face recognition. Launched on Monday in the US, Moments is the name of the application used to share photos with friends automatically and private, without having to publish on Facebook. The app identifies people captured with your smartphone and synchronizes with their gallery of images. The utility is evident on special occasions like weddings, where there are many mobile phones to take: it takes time and patience to hand select all of the photos and send them to various friends portraits.

Moments avoids this work thanks to facial recognition, without which the app has little reason to exist. “The regulators have told us that we have to offer users the choice to enable (facial recognition), and we currently have this option,” said Richard Allan, head of the European policy of Facebook, as reported on the Wall Street Journal. So the European launch is postponed until the company Mark Zuckerberg will not introduce this change.

For Facebook, however, it should not have been a bolt from the blue: back in 2010 had introduced facial recognition on social network, designed to suggest people to tag in photos, but in 2012 has disabled this feature in Europe to meet the Commission’s concerns for the Irish data protection. The situation is different in the US, where the use of facial recognition is accepted even if there is an ongoing debate on the issue.

For more than a year there is a comparison table set up at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration for regulate the use of technology in terms of privacy. The comparison, however, appears to have come to a standstill: just last Monday, coincidentally the same day as the launch of Moments, nine groups Use Privacy wrote a letter announcing the abandonment of the table for lack of progress.