Facebook Facial Recognition Option Review and Features

Sophos, the IT security and data protection firm, has advised Facebook users to review their privacy settings, even as reports have stated that the social networking website has enabled facial recognition for photo tags for many users.

Facebook Tag Suggestions

Last year, Facebook had introduced facial recognition technology to help users tag their friends in photographs. While this feature was rolled out only for users in North America at that time, it has now been silently enabled for the rest of the world. The feature in question is known as Tag Suggestions, which is supposed to make Photo Tagging easier. It uses facial recognition technology (by scanning your profile photo) to recognize you in any photograph posted on Facebook and suggest your friends to tag you in that photograph. This has raised a concern about privacy issues, because you may not want to be recognized in a photograph, but Facebook may still suggest and inadvertently invade your privacy.

Thankfully, Facebook lets you control this feature through the Privacy Settings. Click on Customize settings. You will see an option titled Suggest photos of me to friends under Things others share. Click on Edit settings.
You will find an option Enabled if Facebook has enabled auto-suggestion of photo tags. Click on it, chooseDisable, and press OK to save the setting. You will no longer be recognized automatically by Facebook's facial recognition feature.


Ideally, Facebook should have left this option Disabled by default. Leaving it Enabled by default is certainly not the right way to go and shows Facebook's lack of concern or sheer ignorance for privacy of its users.