Facebook announced that there will be a new feature called the 'Photo Magic' in their Messenger app, which will enable users to share photos of their friends easier.
"This is one of our upcoming features I'm really excited about as it's still way too difficult to share photos with friends, and receive all the ones you're in," wrote Chief Messenger David Marcus on his Facebook Post. "Currently testing in Australia, and if all goes well, [will be] available in the U.S. soon!"
'Photo Magic' has the ability to scan your newly taken photos with the same facial recognition technology being used in the photo tagging suggestion of Facebook, and immediately notifies you with an option to send pics to friends that are in them.
"What we've seen is that private sending of photos in Messenger is really popular. About 9.5 billion photos were sent inside Messenger in the last month," Director of Product Management, Peter Martinazzi, told Josh Constine of Tech Crunch. "It's growing even faster than Messenger over all, which is growing really fast."
As opposed to the Moments app, which scans photos in your camera roll with facial recognition, bundles them up by who is in each, and suggests you send people all the photos you have of them (and which was launched by Facebook last June), 'Photo Magic' will only scan and suggest the last photo that you took.
Privacy groups responded to the announcement of 'Photo Magic' just like how they reacted to the Moments app. They criticized the app for requiring users to turn off the automatic tagging in their privacy setting. They argue that companies such as Facebook should ask first for permission from the users before scanning their photos in the facial recognition software.
In a report from USA Today, Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said that, "The problem with facial recognition generally is that the user who is tagged may not have consented to the use of their image in this way."
