Facebook rolls out face recognition, kills tagging option

If you have face recognition turned on, Facebook will notify you if someone uploads a photo of you, even if you aren’t tagged.

(FILES) In this file photo taken on March 22, 2018 An illustration picture taken on March 22, 2018 in Paris shows a close-up of the Facebook logo in the eye of an AFP collaborator posing while she looks at a flipped logo of Facebook. - Facebook, under pressure to ramp up privacy rules across its platform, said on August 20, 2019 it was rolling out a tool allowing users to control data that it receives from other apps and websites about their online activity. The new tool is to give clients access to their so-called "off-Facebook activity" -- fed back to Facebook with the aim of targeting advertisements -- and give them the option of deleting it. (Photo by Christophe SIMON / AFP)

In a much-needed relief for 2.41 billion users, Facebook is rolling out ‘Face Recognition’ feature to all, replacing the earlier “Tag Suggestions” settings that notified you if someone uploaded a photo and automatically tagged you in it.

People who are new to Facebook or who previously had the “Tag Suggestions” setting will have the face recognition setting by default and will receive information about how it works.

“The Tag Suggestions setting, which only controls whether we can suggest that your friends tag you in photos or videos using face recognition will no longer be available,” Srinivas Narayanan, Applied Research Lead, Facebook AI, said in a statement on Tuesday.

If you have face recognition turned on, Facebook will notify you if someone uploads a photo of you, even if you aren’t tagged.

In December 2017, Facebook introduced a new setting for some people called face recognition.

“Our face recognition setting lets you manage not only whether Facebook uses face recognition technology on photos of you in order to suggest tags; it provides an easy on or off switch for a broader set of uses of face recognition, such as helping you protect your identity on Facebook,” explained Narayanan.

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People who still have the tag suggestions setting will begin to see a notice in their News Feed.

The notice will include information about the new features and options to learn more about how Facebook uses face recognition, along with a button to turn it on or keep it off.

“If you do not currently have the face recognition setting and do nothing, we will not use face recognition to recognise you or suggest tags,” said the social media giant.

In addition, features like Photo Review, which lets users know when they appear in photos even if they are not tagged, as long as they have permission to see the post based on its privacy setting, will not be activated.

“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. If you already have the face recognition setting, you won’t receive a notice,” the company added.

“We don’t share your face recognition information with third parties. We also don’t sell our technology,” it noted.