Gone are the days when you had to manually scan through hundreds of photos to find that one shot of you and your best friend that eludes you. On the three platforms you’re most likely to use to store your smartphone pictures — Apple Photos, Amazon Photos, and Google Photos — machine learning can categorise your photos by the faces in them, rather than rudimentary details like when or where they were taken.

Facial recognition systems are everywhere, from security cameras that try to spot criminals to the way Snapchat finds your face to put bunny ears on it. Computers need a lot of data to be able to learn how to recognise faces, and some of it comes from Flickr.

The 10-year challenge was all fun and memes until last week after a tweet moved thousands of people to worry: are we unknowingly helping giant corporations to improve their algorithms for biometric identification and age progression?

Huawei Australia has released a new firmware update that allows users to unlock their phones with facial recognition software - just like Face ID on the latest Apple iPhones. The new feature has been rolled out to a range of devices. Here's how to get it working.

We've all seen motives or TV shows where the good guys use some smart software to analyse footage and find a single face in a crowd of thousands. The South Wales police force in the UK tried that last June when they tried to scan every face that attended the UEFA Champions League final. But the outcomes were less than stellar as the accuracy of the scanning was very error prone.

We've all seen movies where the law enforcement heroes can find a single bad guy in a massive crowd using security cameras and some clever software. And, until recently, the world of fiction was where such fanciful things belong. But the Chinese government recently tracked down someone wanted over "economic crimes" by finding his face in a massive crowd.

If you've logged into Facebook over the past few days, you've probably seen a note from the social network about expanding its facial recognition features.

New legislation has been introduced to the parliament that will make it easier for state, territory and federal departments to share facial recognition data in near real-time. Five separate facial recognition services will work together so that processes that used to take days can be completed in a time that allows law enforcement and other agencies to identify people more readily.

Hopefully you took advantage of Microsoft's free upgrade offer that allowed consumers to update computers running Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 (and if you didn't, it isn't too late!). If you did, you should take advantage of one of the most convenient and downright pleasant features in Windows 10: The ability to login by simply looking at your PC, using Windows Hello. It's easy to setup, but may cost you a few bucks depending on the PC and accessories you currently own.

Apple's upcoming iPhone 8 will probably let you unlock it with facial recognition, and security experts tell Mashable that's a terrible idea. Current facial recognition technology, like the kind that unlocks a Samsung Galaxy S8, can be fooled by a photo. Samsung pretends this is no big deal, but this gimmick creates a false sense of security that many consumers won't know is about as secure as "swipe to unlock".