Facebook tagging a thing of the past?

Shutterbugs on campus, rejoice — tagging Facebook photos by hand may now be a thing of the past.

Thanks to the new Photo Tagger application, Facebook users can find and tag photos of themselves automatically using digital face-recognition technology.

Photo Tagger, developed by Israeli tech startup Face.com and publicly released this month, boasted over 30,000 users in its alpha testing phase and has been used to identify three million faces in over one billion public photos.

In addition to making tagging faster and more streamlined, Face.com’s similar app Photo Finder can search all albums for pictures of a user and compile an album of all their appearances in friends’ photos.

The app has been praised for its effectiveness — the tech blog TechCrunch.com labeled it an addictive “time vampire.” Photo Tagger can identify individuals in poor lighting, with sunglasses, blurring or low resolution.

Users can also sign up for Face Alerts, which will identify users’ appearance in any new photos so they can visit those photos and confirm or untag themselves.

Considering the broad scope of the app’s searching capabilities, though, some students have expressed concerns for their privacy.

Emily Miller, a College sophomore, was interested in Photo Tagger but disliked the idea of being automatically tagged, suggesting that face searching would be another tool for “creepers.”

“While for some folks face-recognition technology feels a little creepy,” Gil Hirsch, Face.com’s chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal, “we’ve had no complaints or direct issues with the applications.”

The app respects users’ privacy by requiring approval for tags from both the person tagged and the album’s owner. It also works with a member’s current photo privacy settings on Facebook.

The app’s face recognition, like any developing technology, is still far from perfect and may be overzealous.

When Justin Dollinger, an Engineering sophomore, first used Photo Tagger, he was surprised by the number of tags that appeared in one of his albums.

“It’s a really cool concept,” he said.

However, when Dollinger auto-tagged his second album, two formerly dating friends were tagged together. Each sent Dollinger an angry message, which prompted him to stop using the application.

According to Hirsch’s blog on Face.com, users’ feedback has been very positive overall.

“We’re still growing very fast,” he wrote on Face.com’s blog. “At this point we can only improve.”

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