Facebook is introducing a feature that will alert parents before they publicly upload photographs of their children to the social networking site, it has been revealed.
The company’s engineering boss, Jay Parikh, says advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning will allow the system to better analyse the content of images.
The software will send a warning message to users if photos of family members are about to be made public, the Evening Standard reports.
Mr Parikh, speaking at a media event with comedian Dara O’Briain in London last night, explained: “If I were to upload a photo of my kids playing at the park and I accidentally had it shared with the public, this system could say: ‘Hey wait a minute, this is a photo of your kids, normally you post this to just your family members, are you sure you want to do this?’
“I think (it’s) a nice intelligent way for us to help you manage all of the data and the information around you, and that could be just helping you process this stuff and getting it right the first time.”
He added: “There’s ways to keep Facebook safe, so if there’s objectionable content we can find that stuff using these very intelligent systems so that we can weed out this objectionable content faster.”
With around 2 billion pictures uploaded to the social network every day, the kit will also allow Facebook to remove “objectionable content” automatically, rather than relying on humans to check it.
Mr Parikh said that it’s part of a “10-year arc of innovation”, which also includes the possibility of patients virtually visiting their GP using a 3D digital headset.
It’ll also give blind and visually-impaired people a better experience on the website by using a “q&a” system which tells the user who is in a photograph, where they are and what they’re doing.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg opened a new AI research lab in Paris in June to support its existing teams in Silicon Valley and New York.
The French team was set up to develop research projects focused on image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition and other infrastructure.
