Facebook is developing tools that will allow it to automatically spot when parents accidentally share pictures of their children and warn them.

The tool is just one of a range of features that could make use of the company’s sophisticated image recognition technology. Other uses could include making Facebook photos visible to visually-impaired people, and it is already being used to spot specific people in pictures.

Facebook’s vice president of engineering detailed how the technology could eventually look through photos, spot pictures of children, not that parents usually only share such photos with their close friends and warn them that a picture was about to be posted publically.

“If I were to upload a photo of my kids playing at the park and I accidentally had it shared with the public, this system could say: ‘Hey wait a minute, this is a photo of your kids, normally you post this to just your family members, are you sure you want to do this?’

“I think [it’s] a nice intelligent way for us to help you manage all of the data and the information around you, and that could be just helping you process this stuff and getting it right the first time.”

Comedian Dara O’Briain, who was interviewing Mr Parikh, also pointed out that it could save people from uploading embarrassing photographs of things that they might not want online. If the algorithm depicted that there were a sensitive body part on show in the photo, for instance, it could require people to be sure that they want to post.

Mr Parikh also said that the same system can be used to help those who are blind and visually-impaired. He demonstrated a tool that can be used to describe a picture in precise detail, after it had been looked over by an algorithm.

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A person could ask what their family member was doing in a photo, for instance. Since the algorithm can pick out details with great precision, it can spot that a person is brushing their teeth just from a blurry picture of a toothbrush.