Face recognition

Why face recognition?

Many of our customers are looking for photos of famous people. Many photos have the name of a person in the description, without the person actually being in the photo. To help our customers find the right photo, ANP uses person recognition.

How does it work?

For public persons, we separately register who is pictured in the photo. Photos are compared to a list of facial profiles created by the software based on photos of a list of public figures. ANP compiles that list. New persons who are recognized and who meet the criteria are added to the list.

We add a new person to the list of recognizable faces if it is a public person, the person has been in the news more than once, and it is likely that ANP customers will search for these public persons.

If the software recognizes a face, then that person's name is added to the photo's metadata. In this way, customers can search for public figures more easily. We run that software on our own servers, and do not share the face profiles with other organizations.

We do not store the images, the descriptions, the tags and the facial profiles any longer than is necessary to unlock the photos in the image database for the benefit of our customers and ANP. 

What about the privacy aspects?

We only store profiles of known people. In addition, we offer the option to turn off the recognition of your facial profile through the facial recognition software. Are you curious whether you are on the list of public persons, or would you like to be removed from that list? If so, please let us know.

A request can be sent to privacy@anp.nl. ANP will deal with your request as quickly as possible and will respond no later than one (1) month after receipt of such a request. We cannot always comply with your request, especially if it concerns visual material: sometimes the journalistic or cultural interests will outweigh your request. However, if ANP refuses your request we will always indicate in our response why your request is being refused.