Facebook’s new facial recognition features will not be turned on by default

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

Starting today, Facebook is rolling out a new facial recognition privacy setting, which was first announced back in December 2017. Thankfully, the Face Recognition feature will not be turned on by default.

If you have the facial recognition feature turned on, however, Facebook will send you a notification every time someone uploads a photo which contains an image of you even if they opt not to tag you in the photo. You have the option to either tag yourself, continue to stay untagged, or you can report the photo if it’s something you don’t want to be uploaded on Facebook. Facebook has stated that it will roll-out the new privacy settings over the next few weeks to all users.

If you don’t have the Face Recognition setting as of yet, Facebook states that you will receive a notice about the setting in your News Feed and it will give you the option to turn it on from there

If you do not make a choice within the notice, the Face Recognition feature will remain turned off. Facebook says the feature will remain off by default for new users and the option to turn it on will be available to users in the settings menu.

READ MORE: How to opt-out of Facebook’s automatic facial recognition tagging 

Facial recognition is all set to take over and replace Tag Suggestions which let you decide if friends should see a suggestion to tag you in a specific photo when uploaded by them. In short, the new Facial Recognition system is just a better and more advanced version of Tag Suggestions.

Could this lead Facebook into more legal trouble? In the past, they have gotten into trouble before for failing to disclose its facial recognition data, but at least they are being (hopefully) transparent this time around.

What do you think? Do you care about this new feature? Will you leave it turned off? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Google is finally working on a fix for the Calendar spam problem
• Some tricky bastards used fake voice tech to trick a CEO into wiring them $243,000
• Firefox now blocks third-party tracking cookies and cryptomining by default
• Facebook is considering removing Like counts from your thirsty FB posts

Murtaza Islam

Murtaza is a Computer Science student who takes immense interest in mobile technology. He believes the future of computing lies in smartphones because ARM architecture will eventually take over. He also loves to tinker with ROMs and kernels keeping up with the latest in smartphones.