Facebook has reintroduced its controversial tag suggest feature for photos, following its temporary suspension over privacy fears last year.
Surprisingly, the tagging feature is still set as the ‘default’ option, meaning users will have to turn off facial recognition themselves if they want to remain undetected by Facebook’s new photo technology.
The move was announced via a post on Facebook’s Privacy page.
The post read:
As we announced last year, we temporarily suspended our photo tag suggestion feature to make some technical improvements. Today, we’re re-enabling the feature in the U.S. so that people can use facial recognition to help them easily identify a friend in a photo and share that content with them. This is the same feature that millions of people previously used to help them quickly share billions of photos with friends and family.
To learn more about tag suggestions and how to control them, check out our help center here:https://www.facebook.com/help/tag-suggestions and our original blog post here:http://bit.ly/tagsuggestion. If you have questions about tag suggestions, you can ask our chief privacy officer to answer them by clicking “Ask Erin” on the Facebook and Privacy page.
The technology was debuted by Facebook at the end of 2010, and offers suggestions of people a user might want to tag in uploaded photos.
Facebook opened up the feature for worldwide access in June of 2011, but a flood of privacy complaints followed, leading Facebook to suspend the feature, citing “technical improvements”.
The new facial recognition service is currently limited to US Facebook users only. As before, Facebook has defaulted to turning the tagging feature on for all accounts.
Turning the feature off requires the user to access Facebook’s “Timeline and Tagging” Section of its main settings window.
Once there, editing the “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?” feature to the “No One” option will opt them out of Facebook’s photo tagging.
Read the official blog post here: https://www.facebook.com/fbprivacy/posts/532822263424357