Facebook Scans Your Face Without Asking You

Facebook has quietly and secretly activated a new feature, with this feature the friends are nvited  for tagging of photos that seems to be your face. Behind this is an automatic face recognition, Facebook now knows what you look like as it rolls out face recognition by stealth.

Facebook’s ‘Tag Suggestions’ feature is designed to speed up the process of labeling friends in photos posted on Facebook.

If a friend ‘tags’ you in one photo, the technology will automatically scan your face and then try and find matches among all their pictures.

It will then suggest that they ‘tag’ these photos of you as well.

The sudden implementation of the feature, without warning, has sparked concerns among privacy campaigners.

Daniel Hamilton, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘Facebook users will rightly be alarmed to hear that their private information will be used in this way. This is yet another nail in the coffin for online privacy.

‘Websites like Facebook owe it to their users to respect their privacy, not to scan their photo albums with facial recognition software.’

And not all commentators are convinced that opting out will do you any good.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, of PC World magazine, said: ‘Opting out won’t keep Facebook from gathering data and recognizing your face – it’ll just keep people from tagging you automatically.

Using This Method You Can Stop Automatic Face Recognition

This brief tutorial shows you how to adjust the “Suggest photos of me to friends” privacy settings. Click on each picture to enlarge it if you have problems reading the text shown in the pictures.

1. From your facebook home page click on the Account link.

2. When the Account menu opens, click on “Privacy Settings“.

3. On the Choose Your Privacy Settings page, under the heading   “Sharing on Facebook” click the “Customize Settings” link.

4. On the “Choose Your Privacy Settings–> Customize settings” page, under the heading “Things Others Share“, next to the “Suggest Photos Of Me To Friends” setting, click the “Edit Settings” button.

5. The “Photos: Suggest Tags” dialog box will open. Read the information contained in this dialog, then “Enable Or Disable” the feature by selecting the proper option with your mouse. Finally click the “Okay” button to save your changes.