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Facebook is at it again…pushing the privacy line. Last December Facebook announced a new system ‘Facial Recognition’ that was being tested by limited users in North America; they began rolling out this feature globally in June. With the rollout Facebook is changing its users’ privacy settings to automatically turn on a facial recognition feature that detects a user’s face in an image. It is up to each user to opt out of the system, instead of having the choice to opt in. As always, Facebook, after the fact, realizes they should have been more clear with their sites users during the roll-out process when this became available to them.
What exactly is this ‘Facial Recognition’ feature and how can it affect you if you keep it enabled? Presently the site allows your friends to tag you in photos they publish to Facebook; if you are tagged in a photo you do not want to be tagged in you have to un-tag yourself by going to the photo and removing your name (There is no option to opt out of photo-tagging). With the new system your friends will be prompted with various images and once your face is detected Facebook will then encourage your friends to tag you in these photos. Many of the photos could be photos you had removed your tag from or possibly photos you had avoided being tagged in for various reasons. With the ‘Facial Recognition’ system Facebook can now use billions of photos its users’ have uploaded to build a facial fingerprint database.
As creepy as this may sound facial recognition is not new technology. Your local DMV has a photo database that is linked to people’s identities and has used facial recognition to prevent identity theft, additionally facial recognition has been incorporated in digital billboards to target relevant advertising, not actually identifying you but being able to identify individuals by gender; for instance a woman walks by one of these digital signs, she might see a lipstick ad, a man walks by, it changes to a Beer ad.
So how do you turn off the Facebook setting if you don’t want your name to be suggested? It’s not easy to find… To disable the feature, click ACCOUNT in the top blue menu bar, click PRIVACY SETTINGS, under SHARING ON FACEBOOK click CUSTOMIZE SETTINGS link, scroll down to THINGS OTHERS SHARE, click on EDIT SETTINGS tab to the right of SUGGEST PHOTOS OF ME TO FRIENDS, click the tab ENABLED and check DISABLED, then click OKAY (If the setting is not yet visible it means facial recognition is not yet turned on).
Facebook is notorious for automatically opting users into new product releases without their knowledge, privacy experts feel Facebook should introduce new products by asking users if they would like to join rather than automatically signing them up without their knowledge. I’d love to know your thoughts.
