Facebook has done it again: The company enabled a new feature that uses facial recognition to prompt your Facebook connections to “tag” you in photos they are shown. In other words: It recognizes user faces in photos, then shows them to their friends, encouraging them to identify the user by putting a name to the image.
Sounds useful? Yeah, right.
Consider this: A user does not get the option to pre-approve of photos of themselves being published. As you might know, I usually go for a share-all approach. This case, though, is another notch in Facebook’s bedpost of privacy violations. As so many times before, Facebook defaulted to share personal information instead of to protecting it. Again, they went for an opt-out model (where the user has to become actively involved to protect their privacy) and – to top things off – decided to hide the option to disable this “feature” way down in the privacy settings.
This is beyond bad style. Here’s how you disable facial recognition on Facebook.
I can’t wait for a truly privacy-conscious social networking service.
