In June last year, Facebook launched a new standalone application called Moments. It lets users share their photos privately with one or more of their friends on the world’s largest social network. The app also has facial recognition baked in which allows it to detect a user’s friends in their camera roll and group photos based on the people in time. The app has finally been launched in Europe and Canada today but without its biggest feature.
Facebook Moments is already available in the United States as well as in many other countries across the globe. The company had to wait to launch this app in Europe and Canada because it actually had to modify Moments to comply with local privacy laws in both regions.
Compliance means that Moments loses one of its biggest features, so instead of facial recognition that the app uses in other markets, it uses object recognition. This means that the app can’t automatically group pictures based on the people in them but it can only suggest groups of images that may feature the same person. It makes quite a big difference to the user experience.
It was this compromise against the inability to launch the app in Europe and Canada, so Facebook opted to compromise where it could, just so it could get Moments in the hands of as many people as possible. Facebook Moments is available as a free download for both iOS and Android.