Facial Profiler was a free
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
app created to promote
Coca-Cola Zero
Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, commonly known as Coke Zero, is a diet soda produced by the Coca-Cola Company.
The drink was introduced in 2005 as Coca-Cola Zero as a new no-calorie cola. In 2017, the formula was modified and the name updated, the announc ...
by the advertising agency
Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
The
app used
face recognition technology to search a
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...
of voluntarily participating Facebook users to match people based on appearance.
The software's
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...
analyzed face attributes like
skin color
Human skin color ranges from the darkest brown to the lightest hues. Differences in skin color among individuals is caused by variation in pigmentation, which is largely the result of genetics (inherited from one's biological parents), and in ...
, face structure and angles of the face.
Once matched, users could contact their
look-alike
A look-alike, or double, is a person who bears a strong physical resemblance to another person, excluding cases like twins and other instances of Family resemblance (anthropology), family resemblance.
Some look-alikes have been notable individua ...
via their Facebook profile.
Coke Zero claimed the inspiration for Facial Profiler came from the drink itself.
The tagline for the project was: "If Coke Zero has
Coke's taste, is it possible someone out there has your face?"
Building the face database
Facial Profiler's initial phase, launched in September 2009, involved the creation of a "face database".
Faces were gathered from photos that users personally uploaded and tagged to Facebook, stored photos uploaded from user
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...
s and
webcam
A webcam is a video camera which is designed to record or stream to a computer or computer network. They are primarily used in Videotelephony, video telephony, live streaming and social media, and Closed-circuit television, security. Webcams can b ...
photos taken via the app itself.
Once the database gathered a
statistically significant
In statistical hypothesis testing, a result has statistical significance when a result at least as "extreme" would be very infrequent if the null hypothesis were true. More precisely, a study's defined significance level, denoted by \alpha, is the ...
number of faces from both
gender
Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...
s, various age groups and multiple
ethnicities
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people with shared attributes, which they collectively believe to have, and long-term endogamy. Ethnicities share attributes like language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, rel ...
– the matching process began on December 3, 2009.
Reportedly, more than 288,000 people installed the application by December 2009.
Matches and voting
When a match was generated, a corresponding
percentage
In mathematics, a percentage () is a number or ratio expressed as a fraction (mathematics), fraction of 100. It is often Denotation, denoted using the ''percent sign'' (%), although the abbreviations ''pct.'', ''pct'', and sometimes ''pc'' are ...
of
accuracy
Accuracy and precision are two measures of ''observational error''.
''Accuracy'' is how close a given set of measurements (observations or readings) are to their ''true value''.
''Precision'' is how close the measurements are to each other.
The ...
was assigned to the match.
As more users submitted photos, the match accuracy was to increase.
Users could vote on the accuracy of their match and other matches.
Privacy concerns
The app adhered to Facebook privacy policies.
It only searched photos of those who have voluntarily opted into the app. It removed user photos from their database if the user uninstalled the app.
See also
*
References
{{Reflist
Meta Platforms applications
Promotional campaigns by Coca-Cola
Internet properties established in 2009