This Chrome extension reveals how Facebook is tagging your photos
It's no secret that Facebook has been getting pretty, pretty good at recognising objects and people in your photos.
So if you're worried -- or just merely curious -- there's now a Chrome and Firefox extension that will reveal all.
It's called Show Facebook Computer Vision Tags, and it'll show a list of labels that Facebook has assigned to your images. The tech giant has been doing this since April 2016.
The extension is also a way to see how good Facebook is at determining what is in your photos, accurately assigning the tags "sky," "outdoor" and "nature" to the picture below, for example.
Conversely, it struggles sometimes. This below image apparently has five people in it, but clearly there are many more.
Hey, at least it knows the photo was taken indoors.
Adam Geitgey, the developer of the extension, thinks "a lot of internet users don't realize the amount of information that is now routinely extracted from photographs," by products like Facebook and Google Photos, according to his Github page.
With this information, tech companies can figure out that you like the outdoors, you have a dog, or you like watching the baseball. You know, information that could be useful and very valuable to advertisers.
But it's not all about making money. These tags can be useful for users with blindness in helping describe what's in an image, technology that Facebook makes use of now.
It's a double-edged sword, really.
