To be clear: the article claims that Facebook can recognize anyone just by seeing them. They haven&#x27;t demonstrated this ability.<p>It&#x27;s far easier to judge who&#x27;s in your picture among your 20 closest friends than it is to find that face among all two billion Facebook users.<p>State of the art recognition systems still have a few orders of magnitude of accuracy improvements to go before they can solve that problem.<p>See the Iarpa Janus project for some recent government+academic-sponsored work on this front: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nist.gov&#x2F;itl&#x2F;iad&#x2F;ig&#x2F;facechallenges.cfm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nist.gov&#x2F;itl&#x2F;iad&#x2F;ig&#x2F;facechallenges.cfm</a> The task is to recognize terrorists in airport surveillance pictures and such.