Facebook facial recognition software – convenient or criminal?

Tagging photos on Facebook can be a long and tedious task. The uploading process is often slow, and if you have a large album it takes a while to go through photo by photo tagging every single person, however Facebook’s solution to the problem may be more of a problem than convenience.

Facebook recently unveiled a new feature that uses facial recognition software to help automate photo tagging by suggesting which friends to tag in your album by matching face with name.

This “Tag Suggestions” feature first appeared on American Facebook in January, but is now rolled out in other countries. Tag Suggestions uses facial recognition software to match newly uploaded photos to photos that have been tagged elsewhere and then suggests the name of the friend in the photo for tagging.

Many find it alarming to have Facebook identify you and then suggest to friends to tag you in photos based on what you look like, and members of the US House of Representatives agree.

“If this new feature is as useful as Facebook claims, it should be able to stand on its own, without an automatic sign-up that changes users’ privacy settings without their permission,” said Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts in a released press statement.

The “Tag Suggestions” technology may be illegal due to the change it makes to users privacy policies automatically without notifying the user.

Is the convenience of speeding up album uploading and tagging worth the Internet knowing what you look like? Keeping information private on the web is a near impossible task, and Facebook may have made things a little more difficult. Be sure to check your privacy settings for changes to your account.

Rebecca Copeland is an intern at Mom Central Consulting .

Mom Central