1000heads: Facebook facial recognition: do you care?

Today’s headlines:

The news is out this morning that literally overnight, Facebook has switched on facial recognition for tagging by default. Typically of the gargantuan social network, the onus is on the user to opt-out of this ‘upgrade’.

A few things on this -  first, for the super-private, here’s how to do just that –

Step 1.
From the Facebook ‘Home‘ page, go to ‘Account‘ and then ‘Privacy Settings

Step 2.
From there, scroll down to ‘Customise Settings

Step 3.
Scroll down again until you find a section entitled ‘Things others share

You’ll find the setting you need to adjust (it’ll be the one automatically switched to ‘enabled’) right next to the above section. Done that? Right. Good.

To my second, and leading point/question – do you actually care?

Yes it’s easy to get annoyed about Facebook not asking permission to switch this on, as well as automatically assigning you the default setting of ‘Yes, I want this’. However, surely if you’re not an idiot when it comes to privacy, you’ve already got a certain amount of barriers and settings in place that prevent unwanted friends and tags taking place, right?

Surely, if you’re smart with your photo tagging (and with your friend requests for that matter), this new feature (whisper it) actually makes life easier.

Yes, tagging your friends in photos is fun, but it can take ages. Having Facebook SUGGEST [yes – ‘suggest’ – not ‘automatically tag’] to YOUR FRIENDS that you might be in one of their photos really isn’t such a big deal.

Moreover, with marketeers increasingly looking for new ways to interact with your relationships, there might even actually be some room here for some real life, campaign-based innovation. Amazing.

So, for me at least, the question still stands: when it comes to Facebook’s new facial recognition, do you care?

Answers on a postcard (or in the comments below).