Facial Profiler was a free
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
app created to promote
Coca-Cola Zero
Coca-Cola Zero Sugar is a diet cola produced by The Coca-Cola Company. In some countries, it is sold as Coca-Cola No Sugar.
The drink was introduced in 2005 as Coca-Cola Zero as a new no-calorie cola. In 2017, the formula was modified and the ...
by the advertising agency
Crispin Porter + Bogusky
Crispin Porter + Bogusky (also known as CP+B), a member of publicly traded MDC Partners, is an American advertising agency that employed around 700 people. It was founded in 1988 by Sam Crispin. Crispin then became partners with Chuck Porter ...
.
The
app used
face recognition technology to search a
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
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 rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
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 the result of genetics (inherited from one's biological parents and or individu ...
, face structure and angles of the face.
Once matched, users could contact their
look-alike 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 platters coated with magne ...
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, livestreaming and social media, and security. Webcams can be built-in computer hardware or peripheral ...
photos taken via the app itself.
Once the database gathered a
statistically significant number of faces from both
gender
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures ...
s, various age groups and multiple
ethnicities
An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...
– 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 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'', while ''precision'' is how close the measurements are to each oth ...
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
Computer-related introductions in 2009