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posted by martyb on Saturday September 07 2019, @12:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the yeah-right dept.

You Can Now Tell Facebook to Delete Its Internal Record of Your Face

A new 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 added a setting for opting out of certain face recognition features that have raised privacy concerns. If you disable face recognition, Facebook won't automatically tag you 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 images, using criteria like the distance and orientation of facial features learned by an algorithm.

When you opt out of facial recognition on Facebook, the company will delete your template, meaning it will have no original reference point for your face and therefore cannot find your face at all. It's an assurance that Facebook isn't actually retaining data that it could use again someday to recognize your face. Of course, Facebook could compute that template again if you opt back in. And your friends can still manually tag you in an image, though doing so won't lead Facebook to compute a new template for your face.

[. . . .] Opting out also prohibits you from being included in Facebook's facial recognition research, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

"When people turn off their face recognition setting, we can no longer create a face template for them for any purpose, including A.I. research," the spokesperson told OneZero.

FB can add your face to a list of deleted faces to guarantee they don't have it any longer.


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  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday September 08 2019, @08:03AM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 08 2019, @08:03AM (#891232) Journal

    I have already said - I AGREE!

    But claiming that things were said when they weren't is simply being dishonest and, as we both have agreed, completely unnecessary.

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