The feature is called Tag Suggestions, and Facebook started rolling out the service late last year. It essentially maps your face and detects whether or not it matches us with images amongst your friends’ albums. It then nudges them into tagging those pictures accordingly. This would be great for the average beach trip where tagging the same people over and over would be a bother, but it becomes problematic when a well-meaning friend or mistress tags you in something incriminating.
Now Facebook isn’t letting users opt out of the feature beforehand, arguing that people would miss out on the functionality if they did. Although you can change your privacy settings back, this move doesn’t differ too much from previous decisions they’ve made that put them in hot water time and time again.
The good news is that it’s easy to stop Facebook from from using its facial recognition voodoo on you; Lifehacker’s got a complete guide for you here. And the Times notes that the company has admitted some fault, a response on the official Facebook blog saying, “We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.” But that doesn’t change the fact that this misstep is part of a pattern of “change settings and ask questions later” that needs to be fixed.
[NYT]
Image credit: NYT
aw123
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 10:16 AMit doesn’t stop people from manually tagging you in pics you don’t want to be in anyway!
Why can’t facebook add an option so that when I’m tagged in a photo, it asks for my permission before showing that tag to other people. I’m sick of being tagged in drunken photos from 4 or 5 years ago because someone is getting nostalgia.
Elly Hart
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 10:17 AM+1
ozoneocean
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 1:25 PMI keep getting tagged in pics of vases of flowers and blurry shots of weird stuff… The problem is people can tag you on in ANYTHING as a joke and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I haven’t seen any way to remove myself from other’s tags anyway, so I just let it go.
Gabriel
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 10:54 AMThat’s actually a great feature idea! But goes against their business model for sure
Brook
Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 12:02 PMActually it partially does that.
When you want to tag someone in a non-friend’s album, it sends a request to accept that tagging.
However if the album belongs to a person who is on your friends list then it does it automatically.
I guess the idea is that becasue you are friends already you are sharing a lot of personal data and tagging should be trusted. Which in my opinion is fair enough.
Lesson from that though. DON’T accept random friend requests from people who you aren’t friends with and don’t trust.
Carlson Yamamoto
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 1:01 PMDon’t you think it’s funny our government can’t even obtain this kind of information about it’s citizens without a court order, but facebook and other social networking site have been given the latitude? Why not, for the government it’ll be like going to the library and avoid dealing with the ACLU, Lawsuits, etc., Wait is this the facebook that has like buttons all over the web and can track your whereabouts? Not the same facebook that bowed to china, and doesn’t allow it’s chinese users to talk about politics and religion is it? OnlyMeWorld.com the new alternative to facebook.
ChemZ
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 6:12 PMWhat’s Facebook?
Sicarius123
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 8:56 PMAs the person always left responsible for taking pictures at social gatherings because my camera isn’t shit, this feature is awesome!
Gave me the shits having to tag everyone individually.
Dave Lord
Sunday, June 12, 2011 at 9:54 AMBut you’re missing the point, somewhat. The question is “Do THEY want you to tag them, without their prior consent?”