Facebook rushed to explain an unannounced change in its privacy settings on Tuesday when advocates beat them to the punch in alerting users to a global roll out of its face-recognition technology that helps users identify friends in photographs.
The technology scans photos when users upload them to Facebook and determines if faces in the new images resemble those in stored images. If they do, the feature will suggest the photo subject’s name and recommend that the user tag the photo, or label it with the subject’s name. Previously, it was left to the user to tag photos manually, without prompting.
“We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them,” Facebook wrote in a statement.
Facebook originally announced the face-recognition feature on its blog in December, when it began rolling it out in North America. The company did not indicate that the feature would be extended to accounts outside the US until Sophos, a security firm, released a blog post Tuesday saying the option had become available to other Facebook users in the last few days.
Facebook quickly updated its original blog post Tuesday afternoon to say the feature “is now available in most countries.”
The goal of the feature is to make tagging and sharing photos easier, the company told users in its the blog post.
“Every day, people add more than 100 million tags to photos on Facebook,” it read. “While tags are an essential tool for sharing important moments, many of you have said tagging photos can be a chore. (Like that time you had to tag your cousin and her fiancé over and over and over again in 64 different pictures of their engagement party, and then go back and tag the guests.)”
The face recognition feature, “will make tagging multiple photos even more convenient.”
Users can disable the feature in their Facebook privacy settings, but do not have the option of blocking tagging altogether – if they do not wish to be identified in photos uploaded and tagged by their friends, they must un-tag themselves.
