Facebook Facial Recognition & Marketing

Yes I do really look like this in real-life! 😉

Facebook is apparently introducing a new Facial Recognition feature which is going to suggest tags for your photos, based on their similarity to other photos already on the site. Now whilst a lot of civil liberties campaigners have immediately like a trout to the fly jumped and shouted “invasion of privacy” etc etc etc I am feeling faintly amused by the fact that if it actually works, everyone who uploads a picture of Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet is going to have “Alex Sumner” suggested as a tag for it.

This has given me an ace marketing idea! What you need to do is to hire someone who has a passing resemblance to a famous celebrity, and get them to be the “face” of your campaign. Then find all the photos you can of this celebrity and tag them with your “mascot.” Sooner or later, the Facial Recognition feature will kick in and everytime someone uploads a new photo of the celebrity, they will get a tag suggestion for the mascot instead! Then they will be like “WTF? Why is this guy getting tagged in the photo?”

Obviously this is a completely Black-Hat strategy, and hence I strongly advise anyone from actually implementing this. 😉