Another week, another Facebook privacy firestorm. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking giant came under fire once again this week for potentially violating users’ privacy, after online security firm Sophos issued an alert Tuesday that Facebook had quietly turned on facial recognition technology worldwide.
Facebook is using the technology to suggest how users should tag photos they add to the site. The company said last year that it had developed facial recognition capabilities, but at that time it only announced plans to demo the feature with test groups in North America. This past week, users worldwide noticed that the technology had been switched on as an apparently wide scale launch — without any warning from the company.
Facebook soon confirmed in a company blog post that it had indeed begun rolling out the feature “in most countries.” Users can opt out of facial recognition by adjusting their privacy settings, but the feature is active by default.
The issue has set off privacy concerns at the highest levels — the European Union is reportedly set to probe the legality of the new feature — and the web is abuzz with opinions on whether Facebook’s use of face recognition technology is good, bad or just creepy. Here are some of the more salient points people are making:
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Facebook’s default settings should prioritize privacy over openness, Sophos said in its blog post:
“Most Facebook users still don’t know how to set their privacy options safely, finding the whole system confusing. It’s even harder though to keep control when Facebook changes the settings without your knowledge. The onus should not be on Facebook users having to “opt-out” of the facial recognition feature, but instead on users having to “opt-in”.
The fact that facial recognition was made a default setting was also irksome to Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg-based member of the EU’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, who told BusinessWeek:
“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default.”
- Even Facebook has admitted it should have handled the roll-out with more transparency. A company spokeswoman told the Register:
“When we announced this feature last December, we explained that we would test it, listen to feedback and iterate before rolling it out more broadly. We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them.”
- Facebook’s latest privacy fiasco has Google smelling of roses. The search engine giant has said it has developed its own facial recognition technology, but has publicly expressed hesitancyto use it. SearchEngineLand editor Danny Sullivan says that’s not an accident:
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Danny Sullivan
- But not everyone was freaked out by the feature. Software engineer Todd Kitta said all the hubbub was unwarranted:
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Todd Kitta
- And some people even like the addition. Robert Scoble commented on an article posted by TheNextWeb:
“[Facial recognition] is the coolest thing Facebook has done for photos… because it saves me time. I personally turn on everything to be public. If I don’t want you to see it I sure won’t post it on Facebook anyway.”
Social media strategist Clare Callery was similarly happy with the new feature:
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Clare Siobhan
- And of course, some just used the news as an excuse to crack wise:
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James Kendrick
If you have any thoughts about Facebook’s facial recognition rollout, please be sure to chime in via the comments.
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