Facebook changes policy on facial recognition

Facebook posted an update regarding the company’s face recognition technology:

Facebook has always given you control over whether we use face recognition technology to recognize you in photos. This setting was previously called tag suggestions because Facebook only used face recognition technology to automatically suggest tags of your friends in photos. In December 2017, we introduced a new setting for some people called face recognition. Our face recognition setting lets you manage not only whether Facebook uses face recognition technology on photos of you in order to suggest tags; it provides an easy on or off switch for a broader set of uses of face recognition, such as helping you protect your identity on Facebook.

Starting today, people who newly join Facebook or who previously had the tag suggestions setting will have the face recognition setting and will receive information about how it works. The tag suggestions setting, which only controls whether we can suggest that your friends tag you in photos or videos using face recognition will no longer be available.