We discuss Facebook’s ever expanding facial recognition feature and how to stop it recognizing you in photos on the social network.
When James went to upload the photo he had taken at his best friend’s wedding onto Facebook – a photo that showed his newlywed friend and his brand new wife – he was perplexed to discover that there was no need to tag the pair in the photo. Facebook had already done it for him.
The pair had been tagged in the photo even before James uploaded it to his timeline. Hovering over each of their faces revealed the correct tag. As it turned out, both James’s friend and his new wife had their facial recognition option turned on.
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Facebook’s facial recognition technology has been working away in the background of the social networking site, growing stronger and stronger for a number of years now. In 2017, Facebook announced that it was giving their users the option to have their photos scanned by Facebook in order to build-up a comprehensive profile of that user in order to identify them in photos.
Since then, Facebook has been able to do things such as suggesting that someone in an uploaded photo is a particular person, or -as in the case above – just flat out tagging them in uploaded photos. Facebook also claim to provide the ability to alert Facebook users that they may appear in photos uploaded to the site even if they’re not tagged, or even alert them if someone uses their face in a profile picture.
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It’s an interesting idea, but given Facebook’s history with mishandling information about its users, and their ever-growing thirst for any-and-all data about us, it’s still something many users may not be comfortable with. A comprehensive profile of our face is just as unique as a fingerprint or sample of DNA. And if we’d feel uncomfortable handing either of those to strangers at a social networking site, what makes our facial recognition profile any different?
Thankfully, there is an easy way to turn facial recognition off, and Facebook claim once you disable the feature, they delete your facial recognition profile from their servers. However studies in 2019 discovered that many users may not have this option available. If the option is available, you can find it in your main settings.
On desktop, click down arrow in the top right and select Settings and then Facial Recognition from the left menu.
On the mobile app, click the settings icon (the three lined icon) then Settings and Privacy, then Settings, and then Facial Recognition.