Facebook purchases facial recognition firm Face.com (Image: via Techcrunch.com)

This time, the rumors got it right; Facebook has bought Face.com, a facial recognition firm based in Israel. Earlier today, Face.com posted this announcement on its website.

Mike Isaac, from AllThingsD, reported that Facebook bought Faceo.com for 55 million dollars. Expect that pretty soon, the social networking site will incorporate the facial detection software in its photo features.

According to Gil Hirsch, chief executive of Face.com, “…our mission is and has always been to find new and exciting ways to make face recognition a fun, engaging part of people’s lives, and incorporate remarkable technology into everyday consumer products. If you’re anything like us, Facebook is a part of your life every single day. We keep up with our friends and family, share interesting (or mundane) experiences from our daily lives, and perhaps most importantly for us, we share a LOT of photos.”

A few weeks before this announcement, Face.com re-released Klik, a mobile facial recognition app that uses Facebook data for real time identification of people in pictures. Klik also has a gender detection feature, plus a feature that reads moods.

With this acquisition, Facebook is poised to include all of these functionalities in its photo app. Instagram and Camera will have better auto-tagging features, and the possibilities for acquiring this next-gen technology are far reaching.

One of the primary concerns of this technology is privacy. For now, Face.com is unable to detect the names of persons if they aren’t your friends in Facebook, which is good, and hopefully this doesn’t change.

About Neal Alfie Lasta

I enjoy learning and writing about social media and the latest in mobile updates.