Facebook’s Facial Recognition Feature – Why It’s Creepy and How to Disable It

Does the term “facial recognition” in terms of Facebook freak you out a little? If it does, you are so not alone. It gives me the heebie jeebies.  Recently Facebook came out with this new feature that uses this sort of technology to automatically identify people in photos that are posted to Facebook, and then recommend other people that can be tagged.

This is disturbing from a privacy point of view, but it also opens up a lot of other issues as well. Users were not alerted to the new feature. And when it made news, it was discovered the default is set to “Enable”, rather than the other way around. Still others are concerned that Facebook is creating a large database of photos and people to use for facial recognition.

PC World thinks this sort of technology is creepy, and I have to agree. “At the end of the day, Facebook’s facial recognition technology is downright creepy” wrote PCWorld. “Facial recognition technology will ultimately culminate in the ability to search for people using just a picture. And that will be the end of privacy as we know it – imagine, a world in which someone can simply take a photo of you on the street, in a crowd, or with a telephoto lens, and discover everything about you on the internet”.

I myself don’t like the idea of facial recognition technology, but disabling it is very easy to do. Go to Account Settings>Privacy Settings>Custom Settings>Scroll down until you see “Things others share”>When you see “Suggest photos of me to friends. When photos look like me, suggest my name” option, click “Edit Settings” and turn the Enabled to Disabled. That’s it.

–Angela Skinner Mullen