How to Turn Off Facebook Facial Recognition

Facebook’s Facial Recognition is a tool that makes it easier to tag photos. Using all the images that have been updated to the site, Facebook has created a faceprint of every member. When you upload photos, it uses the faceprint to identify all faces and will then tell you if your friends are in the picture.

This feature only identifies your friends and it’s probably already on in your account, as Facebook opts you into most new features. The biggest privacy risk of Facial Recognition, as it exists, is that you may end up being identified in photos you don’t want people to find.

How to Turn Off Facebook Facial Recognition

• Go to Account>
• Privacy Settings>
• Click on “Customize settings”>
• Under “Things Others Share” find “Suggest photos of me to friends” and click the Edit Settings button >
• Click the button that says Enabled and select Disabled.

You may also want to take these other steps to control your image on Facebook.

Background

This week on our Facebook page we’ve been experimenting with Questions. We got some good news: 38% of those who responded said that they had gotten rid of an app they weren’t using and another 30% said they don’t install apps they don’t use. And we got some bad news: 35% of those who we asked if they’d turned off Facebook’s Facial Recognition responded with “WTF??”, an answer added by one of our followers.

That over one-third of our followers seemed to be saying they were confused by Facebook Facial Recognition led me to believe that my post on the topic wasn’t clear enough.