Facebook Frolics 0
Frankly, I think this is creepy:
There are some reassuring aspects to the announcement. To begin with, the company has said that it will keep its existing privacy options around photos and tagging, which include your ability to block tagging or limit who can tag you as well as the ability to remove tags from images after they are posted. Facebook also notifies you whenever you’re tagged in an image.
The company also announced that it will allow users to opt out of having their name suggested to friends during the photo tagging process. If you disable “Suggest photos of me to friends,” your name will “no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually,” according to the Facebook blog.
With the new system, face-recognition software will analyze your photos as you upload them and attempt to identify who is in the picture. It’s not trying to compare the pictures you upload with a database of everyone in the world, everyone on Facebook or even every one of your friends. Instead, according to a representative, it’s looking at the people you interact with most frequently.
I do not tag pictures on Facebook. In fact, most of the few pictures I post are of scenery. not persons.
One reason is that I seldom take pictures of persons when I am with them; I’m too busy enjoying (I hope) their company. The other, and more important one, is that I wonder about the wisdom of uploading someone’s picture without permission. I wonder even more about naming them, even if they use Facebook, unless they are already public figures doing things in public.
My limited use of Facebook leads me to believe that most Facebook frequenters do not mess with the default privacy settings, and the default so far has tended towards treating all your “Facebook friends” as if they were your long lost brothers and sisters with no secrets from anyone.
Follow the link for more information on how “feature” is expected to work.
