Facebook’s face recognition feature will notify if someone uploads your photo

Tech giant Facebook is gearing up to roll out a much-anticipated feature of facial recognition for its 2.41 billion users.

As per the latest on the news, the company is planning on making facial recognition in photos opt-in by default.

The feature will help users be notified if someone upload a picture of someone, even if that user is not tagged which will help in reporting and taking down fake profiles.

“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,” Srinivas Narayana, Applied Research Lead, Facebook Al, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mr. Narayanan further explained, "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."

“People will still be able to manually tag friends, but we won’t suggest you be tagged if you do not have face recognition turned on. If you already have the face recognition setting, you won’t receive a notice,” the company added.

The decision to change its setting comes amid increasing unease about facial recognition technology, which can be used anywhere.

Facebook itself has faced legal scrutiny for its use of technology. Just weeks ago, a US appeals court in San Francisco rejected Facebook’s attempt to undo a lawsuit that alleges the social network unlawfully used facial recognition technology to gather millions of users’ biometric data.

The class-action suit was filed by Facebook users in Illinois, one of the few states with a law that requires companies to get consent from customers before collecting biometric information.