How accurate is Facebook's facial-recognition software?

(UPI) -- In the wake of Facebook changing its privacy settings, many people are starting to wonder how easy it will be for others to search for them by looking up their face via the site’s facial-recognition software.

It might be made to look easy in the movies, but Neeraj Kumar, an expert in computer vision at the University of Washington, says that finding an individual’s identity based off an image isn’t a simple task.

According to Kumar, when a photo is being compared to many other possible matches, coming up with a name is quite difficult.

"Each time you do a comparison, there's five percent chance that it's wrong," Kumar says. "And that adds up. In fact, it multiplies up. Very quickly, you find that a 95 percent accuracy leads to pretty terrible results when you're actually trying to answer the question of, 'Who is this person?'"

Facebook’s biometric database is the largest in the world, and “it's all been formed by people voluntarily submitting pictures to Facebook and identifying who they belong to," said Amie Stepanovich, the director of the domestic surveillance project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Stepanovich is calling for social media companies to share what sort of searches they are capable of carrying out.

"As we're seeing specifically over the past few months, no matter how much a company attempts to protect your privacy, if they're collecting information about you, that information is vulnerable to government search," Stepanovich said.