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Facebook Re-enables Tag Suggestions Face-Recognition Feature In the US
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has brought back its photo Tag Suggestions feature to the U.S. after temporarily suspending it last year to make some technical improvements. Facebook says it has re-enabled it so that its users can use facial recognition 'to help them easily identify a friend in a photo and share that content with them.' Facebook first rolled out the face recognition feature across the U.S. in late 2010. The company eventually pushed photo Tag Suggestions to other countries in June 2011, but in the US there was quite a backlash. Yet Facebook doesn't appear to have made any privacy changes to the feature: it's still on by default."
A camera really can steal your soul.
Facebook is a good idea taken way too far and a userbase that refuses to acknowledge that fact. If we've learned anything from history, people are more than willing to go along with anything that even includes physical assault for the sake of recognition. A little violation of privacy is no sweat.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
I mean, hell, it's in the name.
Welcome to the book of faces!
Perception causes me to believe that this "feature" is a double-edged sword. On the one side, it adds to the whole "social networking" thing. Find friends, recognize friends, connect with friends.
On the other hand, it is a massive crowdsourced facial recognition system that is incredibly difficult to stay away from, even if you refuse to be a part of Facebook (IIRC people can tag you in a picture by typing in your name). It's a f*cking privacy nightmare.
But what do you have to hide, huh? *grin....sigh*
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
How exactly is your privacy "invaded" by having a photo of you tagged as you automatically instead of manually?
So, what's wrong with face recognition on Facebook? How does this violate my privacy?
If the FBI had access to Facebook's database during the days of COINTELPRO, it is doubtful the American Civil Rights movement would have ever occurred.
Facial recognition is an amazingly powerful tool for law enforcement when it comes to political adversaries -- imagine a scenario where local police and the FBI could just pop a photo into the special "Law Enforcement" console on Facebook, and find out who the person is, who their friends are, what their likes/dislikes are, what they order online (what kind of ads are targeted), etc.
It's also sad that most young activists these days are all over Facebook and have been giving it all their information since they turned 13 (or earlier if they just ignored that 13+ stuff), so by the time they become involved, the government has an easy way to find out literally everything about their personal lives. Just upload a picture of them snapped at some political rally, and voila!
The problem is Facebook is so addictive, I see such compulsive behavior clicking photos, and when you block facebook on networks, users downright have panic attacks.
Sounds like George Orwell may have been right: We love big brother.
I don't need a website to help me recognize friends in a picture. If I can't recognize someone in a photograph they're not my friend.
What a lame excuse to implement a system which allows tracking and collecting information on people who don't want to volunteer their information to facebook.
Time to delete facebook.
FB doesn't matter ("stuff that matters", and all that, ya know). Just sayin'. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!111
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
We've got about zero chance of changing facebook policies. Nearly zero chance of legislatively stopping it either (and then there will be plenty of exceptions for "law enforcement" that will just make it so that only the very powerful can abuse these tools).
But what you can do is to pollute their database. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Tag people with the wrong names. Each photo of the same person, tag it with a different name. Or, if you have a lot of photos, use the same (wrong) name a couple of times, before switching it up. That makes it so they can't just throw out all the one-offs. You can also go the other way - upload photos of strangers and tag them with the names of your friends (and yourself).
It ain't perfect, nothing ever is. But facial recognition ain't perfect either, if we can put enough noise into their database, it will make it impractical. At least impractical to be used against you and your friends. Unfortunately, those who blithely use it without concern are just going to have to live with the consequences. For those people, its the online equivalent of giving a gun to a toddler. But until some people actually die as a result, no way facebook will ever be held accountable for such reckless disregard for the welfare of their users.
PS - I am NOT looking forward to "google glasses" becoming ubiquitous and building facial recog databases of everybody in view of the wearers. Even if google doesn't know your name, they do know location, time and the faces of everybody near you. Enough of that sort of data and they can narrow down your identify pretty well.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Money.