Facebook’s New Facial Recognition and Privacy

As you may have heard, Facebook began rolling out its Facial Recognition feature to all of its users in the beginning of June. Currently, Facebook uses this feature to suggest tags to users when they upload photos. It will automatically recognize your Friends in a photo and allow you to tag them in just one click.

As usually, this has raised all kinds of issues regarding privacy. Facebook allows you to opt out of photo-tagging, but this does not prevent them from collecting data on how to recognize you from images. Opponents to this feature, essentially worry that facial recognition will make it easy to gather information on anyone based on a picture. With 600 million users, Facebook could potentially have the largest and most accurate facial recognition database in the world, which makes some people rather nervous about its future use.

OPT OUT OF PHOTO-TAGGING

If you do not like the idea of being automatically recognized in images, you can disable photo-tagging by following the below procedures in Facebook:

1. Click on the Account tab in the upper right corner of your window
2. Select Privacy Settings
3. Locate and click on Customize settings
4. in the Things Others Share section, locate Suggest photos of me to friends
5. Click the Edit Settings button
6. Click the Enable button and select Disable from the drop-down menu
7. Click Okay to save changes

Keep in mind that opting out of tagging will not prevent Facebook from collecting and storing facial recognition data on users. However, many users are uploading and tagging themselves in photos of inanimate objects like trees or teddy bears in order to confuse Facial Recognition and prevent it from identifying them accurately.

SHOULD YOU CARE?

By now Facebook has established a pattern of releasing privacy-invasive features and automatically opting all its users in to these features. Then there is a backlash in the media complaining about the violations of privacy. Then Facebook releases a statement saying something like “we could have handled it better” (which by now indicates they are either incompetent or truly insincere).

At this point users have three options:

• They can say goodbye to Facebook and close their accounts
• They can do their best to monitor and adjust their privacy settings, thus hoping for some level of control and protection
• They can not worry about it

It’s no secret that the world is becoming more open and social and Facebook definitely promotes this. Privacy may be becoming a thing of the past, but for now every individual must decide what’s best for themselves in regards to Facebook.

For more information on Facebook privacy, visit our Facebook 101 tutorial.