Computer and Library Learning (Archived)

The Facebook blog announced that Facebook began rolling out its face recognition technology worldwide as a means to tag photographs. Facebook began making it available to North American users in December 2010. Facebook developed part of the facial recognition technology itself and purchased part of it through license. The technology automatically identifies people in photographs and the settings were changed without giving notice to or seeking permission from individual Facebook users.

Internet security company Sophos is recommending through it blog Naked Security that users change their privacy settings by disabling "Suggest photos of me to friends now" after logging into their Facebook accounts, clicking on “Customize settings”, and looking under the “Things others share” category. Check to see if the option has already been “Enabled” and, if so, select “Disabled” and click on “Okay”. In April 2011, Sophos published an open letter to Facebook, urging Facebook to adopt an “opting-in” rather than “opting-out” approach towards privacy for its users and to always use more secure https connections.

The European Union’s data protection regulators are investigating Facebook over its face recognition feature of tag suggestions. Others suggest that Facebook is not the first to embrace face recognition technology, noting that Google’s Picasa and Apple’s iPhoto both use it. From a positive viewpoint, the face recognition feature facilitates tagging many photographs of the same individual, thereby saving time, and only friends are able to tag other friends in images. Some like Tim O’Reilly argue that face recognition is not going away unless governments are prepared to outlaw it; otherwise, it could help set societal norms for how things are in the present rather than in the past. Others question the invasiveness or even usefulness of Facebook’s initiative, while some suggest that Facebook could have used an information page describing the face recognition technology and asking Facebook users whether they wanted to sign up.

Facebook users can also visit Facebook’s Help Center to access frequently asked questions and answers on photo privacy and photo abuse, including:

“How do I edit the privacy settings for my photo albums?” “How do I edit the privacy settings for my other photos?” “Why are my photo albums visible on the site to people that are not my Facebook friends?” “What if I don’t like a photo I’m tagged in?” etc.