Face-off at Facebook

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on June 8th, 2011 at 10:10 AM | | Tweet

For the last couple of years, whenever my friends get together (in real time), out pop the iPhones. A few hours later, it’s the “tag your it” game on Facebook. There we all are, hoisting wine glasses, kissing our girlfriends, or smiling with jubilation at the notion of fun and frolic. New social caveats include, “Don’t Facebook this,” or, “Wait, Facebook my good side!”

Well, tagging is mostly all in good fun—a sort of cyber thank you, for being part of a great time. But, doesn’t it seem spooky that Facebook seems to be able to identify people you know so readily? Yes, friends, I’m talking about the Tag Suggestions. As if Facebook were your partner, tapping you on the shoulder and inviting you to tag one of the 500 friends you may have inadvertently left out of your tagathon.

So, here we go again. Under attack repeatedly for privacy abuses, Facebook is back in the hot seat for presuming a questionable default when it comes to privacy settings. According to the report, from Sophos, Facebook recently began changing its users’ privacy settings to automatically turn on a facial recognition feature that detects a user’s face in an image, instead of allowing users to “opt in.” I don’t know about you, but this sort of pisses me off. I mean, my real friends KNOW what I look like, they don’t need a third party app to tell them, and it creeps me out that Mark Zuckerberg and co are crawling around the site “recognizing” my facial features. Y’know?

A little uncomfortable with Facebook’s presumption yourself? Here’s how to fix it:

* Go to your Facebook privacy settings (under ACCOUNT).

* Click on “Customize settings”.

* Under “Things others share” you should see an option titled “Suggest photos of me to friends. When photos look like me, suggest my name”.

* Unfortunately at this point you can’t tell whether Facebook has enabled the setting or not, you have to dig deeper…

* Click on “Edit settings”.

* If Facebook has enabled auto-suggestion of photo tags you will find the option says “Enabled”.

* Change it to “Disabled” if you don’t want Facebook to work that way.

* Press “OK”