The social networking site Facebook has a history of adding new features that can potentially have a negative impact on your online privacy, and the company’s latest addition — facial recognition that suggests photos of you for friends to tag — is no different. Unless you know where to look to disable automatic facial recognition, you can’t shut it off, and you may not even realize your face is being served up to people without your knowledge.
If you want to disable Facebook’s automatic facial recognition feature, do this:
- Log into your Facebook account in a Web browser
- Click
Account(It’s in the upper right corner of the Facebook page) - Choose
Privacy Settings - Click
Customize settings(It’s at the bottom of theSharing on Facebooksection) - Click
Edit Settingsnext toSuggest photos of me to friends(It’s in theThings others sharesection) - Set
Suggest Photos of Me to FriendstoDisabled - Click
Okay
Don’t want your face getting around? Disable Facebook’s automatic face recognition.
Disabling automatic facial recognition will stop Facebook from combing through user’s accounts for photos of you, but it won’t stop someone from manually tagging your face in a photo. You should, however, get a notification should someone tag you in a photo so you have a chance to un-tag yourself and help keep at least a modicum of online privacy.
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The most (and perhaps only) effective way to avoid being automatically opted in to intrusive new “features” like this is to select the “deactivate my Facebook account” option.
10 Facebook does something like this
20 They get raked over the coals
30 Facebook promises to be more careful in the future
40 Facebook promises to be more open in the future
50 GOTO 10
This time it might get them in serious trouble. Imagine the suit if their software misidentifies someone and puts them in an inappropriate situation. The face in the picture at Mardi Gras is identified by their software as Senator Smith so he loses a close election. The face at the drunken party is identified but their software as someone’s 16 year old daughter so she loses her scholarship to BYU.
Facebook will get their well deserving a** sued off.
Archimedes was tagged in this photo
I better tag myself in a photo before Archimedes pays me back
Go to all the pictures that already have you tagged on them. Don’t just untag yourself because then you lose an easy link to that picture. Instead, untag your face and retag an inanimate object in the picture as you. So the picture is still in your ‘photos’ list but you screw up
Facebook’s attempts to build a facial recognition profile of you.
Better yet, upload a picture with lots of faces. Say, the group picture from your high school graduation, class size 900. Now tag each and every face in that picture as yours.
Nothing feels as good as sticking it to Facebook and that creep CEO.
Brilliant! I like it.
See http://www.macworld.com/article/160419/2011/06/facebook_privacy_face_recognition.html
Well played, Flashman. :-o
Thanks Archimedes.
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