Facebook has made the announcement that they are updating their facial recognition features.
The idea is that from now on, whenever someone uploads a picture of you in it, whether it be your Aunt who doesn't care if you look terrible in that group photo or someone from your high school uploading a picture from 20 years ago, you'll know about it.
"Facebook launched a new facial recognition feature called Photo Review that will alert you when your face shows up in newly posted photos so you can tag yourself, leave it be, ask the uploader to take the photo down, or report it to Facebook."
Facebook is marketing this as a way for Facebook users to not have random photos of them floating around the internet without their knowledge. Plus, this is a measure to stop online impersonations.
"But Facebook tells me it has no plans to use facial recognition to enhance ad targeting or content relevancy sorting," TechCrunch says, "Like showing you more News Feed posts from friends who post untagged photos of you or ads related to locations where you appear in untagged photos."
There are also other bonuses to this feature such as helping the visually impaired. Facebook's machine vision-powered feature, which audibly describes to users what's in a photo, will also read out the names of untagged friends.
That said, technology like this can be scary. Allowing Facebook to have official records of your facial features can seem like a violation of privacy (even for Facebook).
If you feel that way, the feature is optional and reversible. You can go to Facebook's settings to "delete its face template of you and deactivate the new Photo Review feature as well as the old Tag Suggestions that used facial recognition to speed up tagging when friends posted a photo of you."
