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Facebook Brings Facial Recognition to Photo Tagging

Facebook Photos, one of the social network’s most popular features, is getting a big and potentially controversial upgrade that automatically suggests whom users should tag in photos based on facial recognition technology.

The new feature, Tag Suggestions, will begin rolling out to U.S. users next week, according to Facebook Vice President of Product Chris Cox. He told us that the product utilizes technology that was built in-house, as well as some technology that came from partners. Cox did not disclose the partners Facebook worked with for Tag Suggestions, although we have our suspicions.

Tag Suggestions is fairly straightforward. Whenever you’re offered the chance to tag groups of your friends in an album, Facebook will utilize its facial recognition technology to group similar faces together and automatically suggest the friend you should tag them with. As you can see in the screenshot below, Facebook fills in the “Who is this?” box with its suggestion — all you have to do is click the “Save Tags” button to accept.

Credit: Mashable