Facebook has launched the Moments photo sharing app that most people are not likely to give too much thought to before downloading it. The tool lets you share images with a private network of friends when you don’t want to post them to the social network. Several privacy watchdogs have raised concerns about Moments’ facial recognition technology, the same one Facebook employs to help users tag photographs on its website.
But if people are willing to trade their ‘faceprint’ for access to Internet-based applications, companies like Facebook and Google are hardly going to object. If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of having people even in a restricted group from knowing where you’ve been, whom you’ve been with, when you’ve been at a particular hangout and so on, Facebook Moments is not for you.
Facebook’s latest app rivals Google Photos and Flickr. Basically, Moments scans the pictures on your phone and separates them into groups based on when they were taken and who is in them. Since Facebook has the advantage of knowing who your friends are, it should work out smoothly for users. If someone you know has given the images on their phone the Moments treatment, then photographs bunched into a cluster similar to yours can be synced with yours and vice versa.
This means you can stop begging your friends to upload or share images from events you were at along with them, providing they use the application. In case they don’t and you share pictures with them hoping they will return the favor, they will get a prompt of sorts through Facebook Messenger telling them that you’ve done so through Moments. Since Facebook insists on having tagging on by default, those who don’t wish to be tagged must change their privacy settings on the social network.
You can sync individual or multiple photos, and these will be separated into Private and Synced folders within the Moments app. It is available in Google Play Store and Apple iTunes for Android and iOS devices, respectively. It can be downloaded for free, but is only out for the US at present.