Facebook acquires Face.com facial recognition software

Facebook acquired facial recognition technology company Face.com on Tuesday.

Face.com's acquisition, along with the recent purchase of Instagram, is another attempt by the social networking giant to improve its photo sharing capabilities.

The amount paid for the software remains undisclosed, reported the Wall Street Journal.

Face.com is a company that makes facial recognition software that helps recognize and tag photos on social networking sites.

According to Ars Technica, last month the company released an iPhone app called Klik, which automatically scans photos and can identify people through facial databases that it has collected.

The company claims on its website that it has already scanned billions of photos through social networking sites.

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Facebook and Face.com have not announced what the two companies will do together.

TechCrunch estimate's the software company's worth at about $60 million with over 45,000 app developers using their technology.

It also says that with the purchase, Facebook is trying to dominate the field of mobile photos, possibly allowing users to tag people in just a click after the software has recognized them.

Ars Technica reported that serious questions are raised regarding privacy with facial scanning being more frequently used.

“I am concerned about Facebook's acquisition because Face.com has said it's database includes about 40 billion face prints, and it is unclear at this point what Facebook plans to do with this data,” Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote to Ars Technica in an email.

“We already know that the federal government regularly asks for copies of all photographs in which a user is tagged when it issues a warrant to Facebook."