With Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and a host of other social media platforms watching and documenting your every move - often for life - it's pretty hard nowadays to escape a regretful situation.
In fact, social media can be a source of heartache for people who have no choice but to see photos of themselves and an ex-lover or former spouse. And because such pictures are embedded in our gallery and in other people's timelines, there seems to be no point of escape from memories that are preserved forever in cyberspace.
But now there exists an app that can fix all that, even completely erasing all evidence that may let the user inadvertently dig up a painful memory and unleash the floodgate of tears.
Daily Mail reports that Google has come up with the latest update to its Photos app on Android that can automatically hide a specific person in the People tab. A Google+ post explains how a new tool will cancel out that person in all photos that go under the Rediscover this Day tab.
The Mirror Daily also reports that this new feature works well with Facebook's On this Day, which digs up what a user did a year back and dredges it up for old times sake. On this Day can be personalized to harmonize with Rediscover this Day so that undesirable memories (or people who produce those memories) may be forever wiped out from the face of social media user accounts.
The utilization is very simple. All you have to do is tap the search button on the Android app (look for the magnifying glass in the lower-right corner).Press on the face(s) you would like to hide. Hit the 'Hide' button, and then press to confirm. The cool thing is, when you change your mind or when you get back together with an old relationship, you can choose to undo the action.
Google's version 1.8 update on its Android app also greatly improves the face grouping feature to new countries (such as Canada, the Caribbean and Australia.) The new function is also an interesting display of the power of Google's facial recognition software.
However, the Mirror Daily reports that not all is perfect with Google as the firm had to apologize for having its image recognition software mislabel certain people as apes. Though Google's auto-tagging feature organizes photos very efficiently, it also mislabels dark people as apes.
This is not the first time that it has happened. In July, Flickr's auto-tagging also used potentially racist and offensive tags on images.
People have wondered whether the bug was intentional or a real mistake.
