Facial Profiler was a free Facebook app created to promote Coca-Cola Zero by the advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. [1] [2] The app used face recognition technology to search a database of voluntarily participating Facebook users to match people based on appearance. [2] [3] [4] The software's algorithm analyzed face attributes like skin color, face structure and angles of the face. [1] Once matched, users could contact their look-alike via their Facebook profile. [1] [2] [4] [3] [5]
Coke Zero claimed the inspiration for Facial Profiler came from the drink itself. [1] [4] [5] [6] [7] The tagline for the project was: "If Coke Zero has Coke's taste, is it possible someone out there has your face?" [7]
Facial Profiler's initial phase, launched in September 2009, involved the creation of a "face database". [1] [4] [6] Faces were gathered from photos that users personally uploaded and tagged to Facebook, stored photos uploaded from user hard drives and webcam photos taken via the app itself. [1] [3] Once the database gathered a statistically significant number of faces from both genders, various age groups and multiple ethnicities – the matching process began on December 3, 2009. [3] Reportedly, more than 288,000 people installed the application by December 2009. [1]
When a match was generated, a corresponding percentage of accuracy was assigned to the match. [5] [6] As more users submitted photos, the match accuracy was to increase. [5] Users could vote on the accuracy of their match and other matches. [4] [5] [6]
The app adhered to Facebook privacy policies. [4] It only searched photos of those who have voluntarily opted into the app. It removed user photos from their database if the user uninstalled the app. [4] [5] [6] [7]
A facial recognition system is a technology potentially capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces. Such a system is typically employed to authenticate users through ID verification services, and works by pinpointing and measuring facial features from a given image.
Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape in 2002. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the word casa and "pic" for pictures.
Coca-Cola Zero Sugar is a diet cola produced by the Coca-Cola Company.
OkCupid is a U.S.-based, internationally operating online dating, friendship, and formerly also a social networking website and application. It features multiple-choice questions to match members. Registration is free. OkCupid is owned by Match Group, which also owns Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, and many other popular dating apps and sites.
A scraper site is a website that copies content from other websites using web scraping. The content is then mirrored with the goal of creating revenue, usually through advertising and sometimes by selling user data.
Badoo is a dating-focused social network founded by Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev in 2006. It is headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus and London, United Kingdom, with offices in Malta, Russia and the United States. It operates in 190 countries and is available in 47 languages, making it the world's most widely used dating network. The app is available on iOS, Android, and the web. Badoo operates on a freemium model, whereby the core services can be used without payment.
MyHeritage is an online genealogy platform with web, mobile, and software products and services, introduced by the Israeli company MyHeritage in 2003. Users of the platform can obtain their family trees, upload and browse through photos, and search through over 19.4 billion historical records, among other features.
MyCoke was an online chat game used for marketing the Coca-Cola brand and products. It was created in January 2002 by VML Inc an Atlanta-based digital agency using core technology from Sulake Corporation, the company responsible for a similar popular online game called Habbo Hotel. Version 2 of the game was released in late 2004 on a new technology platform called Galapagos, created by Studiocom, and featuring new locations and a special double-reward 'Coca-Cola Red Room'.
Coca-Cola Freestyle is a touch screen soda fountain introduced by The Coca-Cola Company in 2009. The machine features 165 different Coca-Cola drink products, as well as custom flavors. The machine allows users to select from mixtures of flavors of Coca-Cola branded products which are then individually dispensed. The machines are currently located in major Coca-Cola partners and retail locations as a part of a gradual and ongoing deployment.
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students, in particular Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.
Face.com was an Israeli technology company that developed a platform for efficient and accurate facial recognition in photos uploaded via web and mobile applications. Face.com apps and API services scanned billions of photos monthly and tagged faces in those photos, tying them to social networking information. As of February 2011, the company had "discovered" 18 billion faces across its API and Facebook applications.
Instagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.
A user profile is a collection of settings and information associated with a user. It contains critical information that is used to identify an individual, such as their name, age, portrait photograph and individual characteristics such as knowledge or expertise. User profiles are most commonly present on social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; and serve as voluntary digital identity of an individual, highlighting their key features and traits. In personal computing and operating systems, user profiles serve to categorise files, settings, and documents by individual user environments, known as ‘accounts’, allowing the operating system to be more friendly and catered to the user. Physical user profiles serve as identity documents such as passports, driving licenses and legal documents that are used to identify an individual under the legal system.
DeepFace is a deep learning facial recognition system created by a research group at Facebook. It identifies human faces in digital images. The program employs a nine-layer neural network with over 120 million connection weights and was trained on four million images uploaded by Facebook users. The Facebook Research team has stated that the DeepFace method reaches an accuracy of 97.35% ± 0.25% on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) data set where human beings have 97.53%. This means that DeepFace is sometimes more successful than human beings. As a result of growing societal concerns Meta announced that it plans to shut down Facebook facial recognition system, deleting the face scan data of more than one billion users. This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology's history. Facebook planned to delete by December 2021 more than one billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features. However, it did not plan to eliminate DeepFace which is the software that powers the facial recognition system. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products, according to Meta spokesperson.
Google Photos is a photo sharing and storage service developed by Google. It was announced in May 2015 and spun off from Google+, the company's former social network.
FindFace is a face recognition technology developed by the Russian company NtechLab that specializes in neural network tools. The company provides a line of services for the state and various business sectors based on FindFace algorithm. Previously, the technology was used as a web service that helped to find people on the VK social network using their photos.
Clearview AI is an American facial recognition company, providing software to law enforcement and government agencies and other organizations. The company's algorithm matches faces to a database of more than 20 billion images collected from the Internet, including social media applications. Founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, the company maintained a low profile until late 2019, when its usage by law enforcement was reported. U.S. police have used the software to apprehend suspected criminals. Clearview's practices have lead to fines by EU nations for violating privacy laws and investigations in the U.S. and other countries as well.
Meta Platforms Inc., or Meta for short, has faced a number of privacy concerns. These stem partly from the company's revenue model that involves selling information collected about its users for many things including advertisement targeting. Meta Platforms Inc. has also been a part of many data breaches that have occurred within the company. These issues and others are further described including user data concerns, vulnerabilities in the company's platform, investigations by pressure groups and government agencies, and even issues with students. In addition, employers and other organizations/individuals have been known to use Meta Platforms Inc. for their own purposes. As a result, individuals’ identities and private information have sometimes been compromised without their permission. In response to these growing privacy concerns, some pressure groups and government agencies have increasingly asserted the users’ right to privacy and to be able to control their personal data.
