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Facebook internal face recognition app could identify employees and friends

You only hear about Facebook in the news lately whenever CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress or when a scandalous revelation makes headlines again.

One example of the latter is an internal app that allowed Facebook employees to use facial recognition on their co-workers.
And while the app has supposedly been discontinued and never publicly released, the mere fact that Facebook had such an app might already be enough to raise red flags yet again.

Second, it was used only for Facebook employees to use on other Facebook employees, with the caveat that employees friends are also fair game if they had face recognition enabled.

Privacy advocates might be worried that Facebook has such an app in the first place although, to be fair, it isnt that surprising. It has, in fact, been using face recognition to tag friends in photos you upload to Facebook, something the company did get a lot of flak for just a few years back.

The existence of such a tool in Facebook employees hands isnt reassuring either, whether or not the app has been discontinued. The social networking giant has not been known for being too careful about its own tools, even or especially the ones that could violate user privacy.

Original article