Los Angeles — If you have hoards of tag-happy Facebook friends, and if you are concerned about certain pictures of yourself on the popular social network, then you may want to read this. Facebook is pushing the privacy line once again, according to a new report from Sophos, the social media outfit has quietly been rolling out a facial recognition feature that makes it easier to tag friends in snaps, renewing concerns about the privacy practices of the world’s top social networking service.
The most dreaded feature, which Facebook automatically activated for Facebook users, has been expanded from the United States to “most countries”, Facebook said on its official blog on Tuesday.
According to a report from Internet security consultant firm Sophos, which issued a warning on Tuesday stating that the social media powerhouse had enabled facial recognition features on accounts without informing users of the change.
Facebook recently began changing its users’ privacy settings that automatically activated a facial recognition feature that detects a user’s face in an image. The feature basically means that whenever the person’s face is detected, the Web site then encourages Facebook friends to tag them. However, the company’s international release of the feature has raised eyebrows in some circles.
The post continued: “We launched Tag Suggestions to help people add tags of their friends in photos; something that is currently done more than 100 million times a day. Tag Suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested. If for any reason someone does not want their name to be suggested, they can disable the feature in their Privacy Settings.”
Facebook, which introduced this facial recognition feature last December, but only made it available to users within the United States, but affirmed on the blog that the feature was in fact now more widely available.
However, when questioned about the Sophos report, Facebook responded in an emailed statement that “We should have been more explicit with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.”
The new tagging is not much different from the way things used to be — friends could always tag photos of you, and you would have to un-tag yourself manually. The difference is that the process is now semi-automated, and some may find this an offense to their privacy. Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos seems to agree:
“The responsibility should not be on Facebook users having to ‘opt-out’ of the facial recognition feature, but instead on users having to ‘opt-in,'” Cluley argues. “Yet again, it feels like Facebook is damaging the online privacy of its users by stealth,” wrote Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos.
“Unfortunately, once again, Facebook seems to be distributing personal information by default,” a Sophos spokesperson said in a statement. “Many people feel distinctly uncomfortable about a site like Facebook learning what they look like, and using that information without their permission. Most Facebook users still do not know how to set their privacy options safely, finding the whole system confusing. It is even harder though to keep control when Facebook changes the settings without your knowledge.”
However, to avoid embarrassment, you may not want Facebook suggestion, especially, when your friends go to tag everyone in that picture from last week’s mud-wrestling pool party, here is how you disable the feature.
To opt out of this feature, you will need to follow these steps:
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Go to your Privacy Settings on Facebook.
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Click on “Customize settings” at the bottom.
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Scroll down to “Things others share” you should see an option titled “Suggest photos of me to friends. When photos look like me, suggest my name.”
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Click on Edit Settings.
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Change the option from Enabled to Disabled.
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Click OK.
If at step four you do not see an Edit Settings option, you will likely see “This option is not yet available to you.” So, you will have to wait before Facebook rolls out the feature to your account before you can change your Privacy Settings for this feature.
However, this is an easy fix, we can see some privacy-focused users getting irked about the option being turned on without their knowledge. And this would be the first time Facebook has activated a feature without users’ consent.