Wednesday, 8 June 2011 at 01:19

It’s time to once again login to Facebook so as to review and update your privacy settings. Facebook has rolled out its facial recognition technology to countries outside of the USA. And in typical fashion it has switched the new feature on by default. You might want to disable this function if you don’t want Facebook learning what you look like and using the information without your permission.

What’s it do? The facial recognition software scans newly uploaded photos and then identifies faces from previously tagged photos. Facebook hasn’t felt the need to tell us this is happening. If you don’t want your name to be suggested, you’ll need to disable the “Suggest photos of me to friends” feature in your Facebook privacy settings.

Here’s how to do it:

• Go to your Facebook account’s privacy settings.
• Click on “Customize settings”.
• Under “Things others share” you should see an option titled “Suggest photos of me to friends. When photos look like me, suggest my name”.
• At this point you can’t tell if Facebook has enabled the setting or not. You have to click on “Edit Settings”.
• If Facebook has enabled auto-suggestion of photo tags you will find the option says “Enabled”.
• Change it to “Disabled” if you don’t want Facebook to work that way.
• Click “OK”.

We recommend you regularly adjust your Facebook privacy settings to make sure you properly manage what is shared and with whom it’s shared. As we’ve seen in this latest example, the rules that protect your privacy on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn change frequently.

Please remember that you need to make it a priority to check the privacy policy and your privacy settings when you join a social networking site. Many sites will share your personal information with advertisers and people you don’t know by default.

When new features are added to social networking sites this could impact your privacy, so make sure you go back often and check for any changes to how your privacy is managed, otherwise you could be sharing more about yourself than you realise.

Source: AVG Blogs | AVG Free Edition

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