Facebook Changes Privacy Policy, Turns On Facial Recognition For Millions Of Visitors

Facebook facial recognition technology was revealed towards the end of 2010 and offers users the option to have photographs automatically tagged, at the time of the announcement the program was not made available so users couldn’t choose to turn it on or off at will, however many users are not reporting that the program is live and they were not made aware of the changes to their account.

The program works by scanning the billions of photos on Facebook and checking for facial matches to your friends previously tagged photos, at which point Facebook urges your friends to tag your photos. This means Facebook is bugging your friends to tag you in their photos, an option some users may shudder at the thought of.

If you don’t want your friends to tag you, something you don’t have control over, you can follow these steps:

1. Navigate to your Facebook privacy settings.

2. Choose “Customize Settings.”

3. Look for the section “Things other share” and find the option titled “Suggest photos of me to friends. When photos look like me, suggest my name.”

4. Click on “Edit Settings.”

You will then see a screen pop up and under the photos that are displayed you will see “Suggest Photos of Me To Friends” which is more than likely set to “Enabled”

Click on the “Enabled” drop down button and choose “Disabled” and then press the “OK” button shown at the bottom right sid of the screen.

Photo facial recognition tagging is now disabled.

[image via: NakedSecurity]