Facebook is forgetting your face
Facebook will no longer be using your face to suggest possible tags on images and videos.
The platform recently announced it would remove the short-lived automatic facial recognition feature that was originally rolled out in 2017. The feature automatically notified users when their face was included in a photo or video on the social network site.
When the facial recognition feature was announced and rolled out to some users, privacy was flagged as a potential issue.
Now, the new change is being implemented after communications with privacy experts, regulators and users.
So what is changing? Facebook is giving new and existing users the power to decide whether they want it to recognise their face or not.
For those who hadn’t previously been granted permission to turn their facial recognition on or off they will be given information detailing the change through a notice on the News Feed.
The new setting, and features like Photo Review, will be off by default.
‘‘People will still be able to manually tag friends, but we won’t suggest you to be tagged if you do not have face recognition turned on,’’ Facebook’s artificial intelligence applied research lead, Srinivas Narayanan, wrote in a blog post on Facebook’s Newsroom.
The original tag suggestion will also be completely removed.
‘‘The tag suggestions setting, which only controls whether we can suggest that your friends tag you in photos or videos using face recognition, will now no longer be available,’’ Narayanan wrote.
The global change rolled out last Tuesday.