Karly Gaffney is a Manager on the Content and Community team at Social Media Group. Follow @_topshelf
Facebook recently acquired facial-recognition firm Face.com, reviving concerns about their use of facial-recognition technology.
For those who are super creeped out by Facebook facial-recognition tagging, there are ways to limit the use of the feature (though it can’t be turned off completely). The steps below will prevent Facebook from suggesting your name/tag to your friends when they upload photos of you.
- Go to your Facebook account’s privacy settings.
- Go to “Timeline and tagging” and click on “Edit settings.”
- Choose “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?”
- Select “No one” if you don’t want Facebook to tell your friends when it has recognized your face in a photo they have uploaded.
- Press “OK.”
(Note, some accounts may not have this option available just yet, mine for example. I will continue to check back and will update this post once I have the option to remove the feature.)
Making the above changes doesn’t necessarily mean that Facebook won’t learn about what you look like and associate it with your likes and friendships, but it does mean that you can opt out of Facebook being able to use the data it has collected on your beautiful mug shot.
These steps are somewhat of a band-aid fix until Facebook decides to change the rules of the game (again). It does make me feel a little bit better about protecting myself online and on Facebook. What do you think about Facebook using facial-recognition features to recommend your photos to friends?