Facebook face recognition

Saturday, June 11th, 2011 at 7:49 am

Well, it has happened again. Facebook has slipped in another controversial change and this time, there are a lot of upset people who want to go after them. Earlier, I did a post on the facebook newsfeed changes. This time it is the face recognition software and just on the heels of “weinergate”.

I have heard of this type of software being used to catch criminals, but never in a setting such as this. Basically, the software is able to match pictures of you together. So, having a picture of a wanted criminal, the software can take pictures of people entering a certain venue and match them against a database of known pictures. It actually caught 19 criminals at last year’s Super Bowl. (What I want to know is how did they score those tickets in the first place!!)

Any way, facebook is using it for tagging photos, so basically once you have tagged a photo of yourself anytime a photo of you gets uploaded facebook can recognize it. When the photo is uploaded, facebook then suggests to that person to tag you on the photo. Just like pretty much everything, some people see this as a neat thing and others don’t like it as much. For the most part, those who don’t like it see it as an invasion of their privacy.

If you are in the group that thinks it is an invasion of your privacy, here is how you undo it:

First, you want to look in the upper right hand of your face book page and click the button that says ACCOUNT. That will bring up a menu that will allow you to click on PRIVACY SETTINGS. Once you are in this option, there will be a small button at the bottom that says CUSTOMIZE SETTINGS. Click this button to bring you to the next menu. You will probably have to scroll down a bit, but there will be a section called THINGS OTHERS SHARE.

Where it says “Suggest photos of me to friends”, click the EDIT SETTINGS botton. Once you have done this, you are then able to select the option that says DISABLED. Click okay and you are done. Hope this helps and happy surfing.