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Why should I turn off facebook’s facial recognition?

June 15th, 2011 by steve

I just turned off Facebook’s Facial Recognition software. You know what that is, right? It’s a new feature that uses facial recognition algorithms to identify users in photos and recommend those photos to other people so they can tag these images.

You may wonder, why anyone would bother to turn it off. It bugs me that facebook might see someone who looks like me doing something I might not do and tell my friends, “Hey– I think this is Steve!” I find it easy enough to get into trouble without being blamed for things that may be done by my evil twin! So I turned off the facial recognition feature.

How to turn off facebook facial recognition:

  1. Select “Account settings” from the drop-down “Account” menu in the upper right.
  2. Go to “Privacy” and select “Manage”.
  3. Click “Custom”
  4. Select “Customize settings.”
  5. Go to “Things others share.”
  6. Find “Suggest photos of me to friends” and click “Edit settings.”
  7. Turn the feature from “Enabled” to “Disabled”.
  8. Click OK and you’re done.

Facebook makes many things easy. Privacy is not one of them.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 at 9:10 am and is filed under General Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Why should I turn off facebook’s facial recognition?”

  1. Ken Says:
    June 15th, 2011 at 9:22 am

    I can’t wait until Facebook goes away. What a time wasting stupid website.

    Maybe I’m just antisocial? I might go there once a month if something very interesting is posted. And I flick through updates on my phone, and it’s always the same stupid stuff. People who think their opinions are worth hearing and usually their aren’t.

    You want to yack and vent get a blog!

    But yeah, I agree. Turn all that junk off!

    –man I think I got up on the wrong side of the bed!

  2. alacy Says:
    June 16th, 2011 at 9:00 am

    As I understand it, facebook facial recognition only suggests. Also it only applies to friends. That is the only way it will suggest someone in the picture is Steve is if one of Steve’s friends posts the picture. If someone that isn’t in Steve’s list of friends posts a picture, no matter how much someone in the picture looks like Steve it will not suggest Steve’s name. This is done for performance reasons, when a picture is posted it doesn’t have to try and match to all 400 million people in facebook. Also when Steve’s friend does post a picture and it suggests one of the people in it is Steve, they have to verify it. Facial recognition on or off, Steve’s friends can always tag picture with Steve’s name and it doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t in the picture

  3. alacy Says:
    June 16th, 2011 at 9:01 am

    Note I have facial recognition turned off for me. If someone wants to tag me in a picture they are going to have to do it by hand.