Facebook updates its controversial facial recognition settings

Facebook is making its facial recognition features easier to turn off and will no longer automatically opt new users into face tagging, the company announced Tuesday.

Facebook has long used facial recognition to identify faces in photos its users upload. This allowed the company to automatically suggest tags based on your friends list, in a feature called "tag suggestions." 

In 2017, the company started replacing "tag suggestions" with a broader "facial recognition" setting. This controlled tag suggestions, as well as the ability for Facebook to alert users if their photos were being used by someone else on the platform. But the "facial recognition" setting wasn't available to all of Facebook's users, and the Federal Trade Commission called tag suggestions "deceptive" because it was enabled by default. Other privacy advocates criticized the feature because the name "tag suggestions" didn't make clear that Facebook was storing biometric data about its users. Read more...