Friday, June 17, 2011

Facebook Face Recognition - More Control of your Image Slipping Away?

Photos Gone Wild!!

 Facebook have done it again - adding face recognition software to the range of tools.  Called Tag Suggestions, the program digitally scans the faces in photos and suggests who they are so that you can tag them. The company claims that this feature makes it a lot easier for users to label and share photos. But it also makes it a lot easier for teens' online identity to get away from them.

So What?

Let's say you go to a party and everyone is snapping away photos on their mobile.  Next day thanks to Facebook, face recognition and easy tagging your "party experiences" are being broadcast across the Internet.  Is this what you want? Can you rely on your friends' to know, understand and to have set appropriate privacy settings?  What about their friends, or the friends of those friends?  While Facebook does notify users when they're tagged -- after the fact -- you still have to go in and un-tag yourself if you don't want to be identified. Facebook is a leaky bucket people, no matter how you configure your privacy settings!   You may have a case of photos gone wild and need to find ways to combat them!!

The message here is NOT, "Don't share photos on Facebook", but "Think about what photos you share on Facebook and the impact they may have on you and your friends should they be seen by a different audience".  Increasingly universities and employers are using social networking to get an understanding of the person they are interviewing.  Showing an interviewer your Facebook page can even be part of an interview process.

Treat the Internet as the most public space in the world and let that guide your attitudes and behaviours there.  Then you won't go far wrong.


How to Disable Tag Suggestions
From your Facebook page, click on Account.
Choose Privacy Settings.
Click on Customize Settings.
Scroll down to Things Others Share.
Next to Suggest photos of me to friends, click on Edit Settings.
Click on Disabled and click Okay.

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