Ten months after launching in the US and most elsewhere, Facebook’s Moments app is finally available in the European Union and Canada, completing its worldwide rollout.
If you’re not familiar, Moments is meant to make it easy to share images of specific people in your camera roll by using facial recognition technology. After taking photos at a wedding, for instance, you could easily pick out all the photos you took of the bride and groom, and even send them out as a bundle.
That facial recognition is why it took so long to complete the worldwide rollout; Facebook had to modify the app to conform to the EU and Canada’s privacy laws.
Unfortunately, it means the app has been somewhat dumbed down; instead of its full-fledged facial recognition technology (the same it uses to tag your photos online), it now uses a kind of object recognition.
In practice, that means that instead of automatically tagging photos, it can now only suggest groups of images that maybe feature the same person. The European and Canadian version of the app will ask users “Who’s this?” before attempting to find matching faces.
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