Facebook users around the world will have one more privacy setting to worry about with the addition of automatic facial recognition technology for user photographs. According to The New York Times, Facebook altered its privacy policy to opt-in users to its relatively new automatic tagging feature.
The new rules mean that any Facebook user will automatically be tagged when that user or a friend uploads photos to the website. There is no option to avoid being tagged in a photo except to manually un-tag each photo after the fact or to disable the facial recognition feature. The process for disabling that feature, however, is not exactly linear. Users must click through 6 different layers of privacy settings to finally arrive at the option to enable the option entitled “suggest photos of me to friends”.
The company has been scrutinized in the past for changes to its user privacy policy, which generally introduces new features on the site by automatically opting-in its users. The new feature has already been in testing in North America and is now being rolled out around the world.
Read more at The New York Times.
