If you want to switch off Facebook's cheeky new auto facial recognition feature:
• Click on Account then Privacy Settings
• Click on Account then Privacy Settings
• Click on the blue link that says ‘Customise settings’
• Scroll down the page and click on the link that says ‘Suggest photos of me to friends’.
Change from ‘Enabled’ to ‘Disabled’.
Bloomberg reports: Facebook Inc. will be probed by European Union data-protection regulators over a feature that uses face-recognition software to suggest people’s names to tag in pictures without their permission.
A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the EU’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rule violations, said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Authorities in the U.K. and Ireland said they are also looking into the photo-tagging function on the world’s most popular social-networking service.
“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default,” said Lommel. Such automatic tagging suggestions “can bear a lot of risks for users” and the European data-protection officials will “clarify to Facebook that this can’t happen like this.”
Facebook said yesterday on its blog that “Tag Suggestions” are available in most countries after being phased in over several months. When a Facebook user adds a photo to their page, the feature uses facial-recognition software to suggest names of people in the photo to tag based on pictures in which they have already been identified. Before the feature was rolled out, users could tag pictures manually without permission from their Facebook friends.
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