How To Disable Facebook’s “Creepy” Facial Recognition Feature
So unless you have been living under a stone for the last couple of days you will have seen that Facebook is in a bit of hot water over it’s automatic facial recognition tool that it introduced. Facebook are of coursed used to this sort of controversy around privacy and this time the biggest problem seems to be that they tried to sort of slip it in under the radar. The concept is very simple in that Facebook have developed technology that can automatically scan your photos and it is recognizes your friends it will prompt you to tag them. Tagging is one of the features that made Facebook grow so quickly and this automated tagging is a sort of way of speeding up that growth and increasing social interactions. I actually don’t see a lot wrong with the idea and in fairness to Facebook they send an alert to the person tagged and they can remove the tag instantly if they want. This feature has annoyed people though and it’s the fact that Facebook slipped it in to the default privacy settings without asking users that has annoyed people so much. Here is how you can disable it…
Find Your Privacy Settings
If you log in to your own personal Facebook account and look up in the top right hand corner you will see a button that says “account” which when clicked will reveal a drop down menu. Click on “privacy settings within that menu.
Customize Your Settings
So this is the page where you can come at any time to change any of your privacy settings. In fairness to Facebook they give you every single option that you could ever want for keeping your profile private but the one that you are looking for to change your photos is the “customize settings” button in the middle towards the bottom of this page.
Things Others Share
This is the section of Facebook where you can pretty much change all the settings around what people share involving you. This can mean places, what gets shared on your wall and if you want to control the new photo feature click on “Suggest photos of me to friends”.
Disabling The Settings
Finally after all those steps and drilling down through the options you are brought to the screen where you can actually disable this feature. This is where Facebook gets in trouble because although they do allow you to disable this feature the average Facebook user is never going to find this setting or have a clue it is even there!
