Facebook announced this morning that its private photo-sharing application, Facebook Moments, is now available in all countries worldwide, thanks the launch of a new, modified version in the EU and Canada. While the U.S. and other international versions of the application take advantage of facial recognition technology to suggest which friends to share with by identifying who appears in your photos, the modified being launched now does away with that feature due to various privacy laws and regulations in these markets.
This makes the app a bit more labor-intensive, as it now can’t automatically identify who is in your photos – it can only suggest that a group of photos that may contain the same person.
Explains Facebook, this modified version of the app doesn’t use facial recognition technology, but rather groups together multiple photos that “appear to include the same face.”
To make this determination, Facebook says it instead uses a form of object recognition, which is based on features like the distance between a person’s eyes and their ears.
This is a step down from facial recognition, and may not be as accurate.
It also means that the new version of Facebook Moments will have a different user interface for these users, where the app poses the question “Who’s this?”
The app then allows the user to optionally give that group of similar photos a private label – like “Mom,” or that person’s name. The labels users assign are private only to them, however. Facebook says no one else will see them.
Facebook Moments is one of only a handful couple of fruitful twist offs from Facebook's center item, taking after the breakout of Messenger. This is thanks in vast part to some prior substantial advancement of Moments in the Facebook News Feed, and also joining with Facebook Notifications and Messenger, where clients are alarmed to the way that their companions have imparted photographs to them. These messages incite the client to introduce the application to see the photographs.
Facebook moreover selected to supplant its photograph synchronizing administration with Moments before the end of last year, and asked clients who depended on that element to utilize Moments.
That procedure appears to have worked. To date, Facebook lets us know that more than 600 million photographs have been partaken in Moments.
What's more, as per App Annie, the application is likewise positioned #8 in the U.S. Application Store in the profoundly aggressive Photo and Video classification, and additionally #39 Overall among the free applications. Facebook doesn't say what number of clients have downloaded Moments, or how frequently they share photographs. Yet, it's unmistakably a huge number, given these rankings.
Be that as it may, in light of the need to haul out the facial acknowledgment highlight in these select markets, clients hadn't yet possessed the capacity to impart their photographs to companions anyplace on the planet as of not long ago.
The new application is accessible now on both iOS and Android in both the EU and Canada.