You Can Now Tell Facebook to Delete Its Internal Record of Your Face
An updated feature allows Facebook users to opt out of facial recognition on the social network
Facebook users can now tell the company not to run facial recognition on their pictures.
The company announced Tuesday that it has updated and rebranded its setting for opting out of certain face recognition features that have raised privacy concerns. If you disable face recognition, Facebook won’t automatically suggest tags in images, nor will it automatically suggest tags of your friends. Opting out will also stop Facebook from searching for you in other images on the site using its Photo Review feature — which is designed to notify you when someone uploads a picture of you that you aren’t tagged in, perhaps so that you can flag impersonation or other problems.
The update will also have a significant impact on the underlying technology that allows Facebook to recognize you in the first place, the company told OneZero. Facebook processes images to extract what your face looks like into a hidden string of numbers called a template, according to the company’s website. Fundamentally, facial recognition is just comparing how statistically similar your string of numbers is to other strings of numbers extracted from other…
