Facebook recently made a major update by making its facial recognition feature available to all users but will keep it an opt-in by default. This opt-in policy needs the attention of Facebook users to give consent to the features that could compromise their privacy. Opt-in policies have been found to be effective since they give the users the most privacy by default, rather than requiring that they take action to turn the feature off. Europe’s GDPR privacy rules followed this logic for one time or for instance when requiring opt-in consent for websites’ use of tracking cookies.
“ Our face recognition setting lets you manage not only whether Facebook uses face recognition technology on your photos in order to suggest tag; it provides you an easy on or off switch for a broader set of uses of face recognition, such as helping you protect your identity on Facebook”, this was written by Srinivas Narayanan, Applied Research Lead, Facebook AI.
These suggest tag feature, powered by automated facial recognition, was activated for all social media users by default in 2011. It was then stopped in the EU in 2012 over privacy concerns, but facebook again activated in 2013 and in 2017 a user was actively notified when a photo of them was uploaded, which was a matter of worry as it could open the doors for harassment. Now onwards this feature of facial recognition will be turned off by default and you will also be notified regarding the same in your news feed where you can also turn it on but only if you want it. Following these, the notice will also include information surrounding the new features and options to help users to learn more about how Facebook implements face recognition. In case if you don’t have this setting currently then Facebook will not use face recognition to recognize you or suggest tags. Some other features also included in this like Photo Review that notifies you when you appear in photos even if you are not tagged will also stay deactivated until you feel it turning it on. You can always spot new features in the Facebook setting Menu.
Narayanan further said about this topic and added: ” We’ve continued to engage with privacy experts, academics, regulators and people on Facebook about how we use face recognition and the options you have to control it”.
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In the previous times, Facebook has received heavy backlash over privacy-related issues, this move by the tech giant of Facebook seems to be headed in the right direction. The new policy could also decrease the data of Facebook that it has gathered about users who don’t opt-in. The data doesn’t include only about the appearance of the user but also about the connections with other users. Recently one of the studies has found that a European privacy rule reduced the online effectiveness of advertising targeting by 65%. This makes a heavy impact on Facebook’s revenue as its primary source of revenue is this only but due to this, it has reduced the advertising sales. These new policies might reduce the number of notifications that opted-out users receive, possibly reducing the time spent on social media and in turn, it would lessen the amount of advertising they view.
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Following this only last week, Apple also made a parallel decision to Siri voice recordings temporary by default, and ask users to opt-in to having them saved. Apple has always maintained its image as a more privacy-conscious alternative to the likes of Facebook and Google.
