Facebook Will Stop Scanning People’s Faces by Default

Facebook seems to be following ahead its promise of transforming into a more privacy-focused company, and it’s making a major change to its service this week. The company will soon notify existing users of its Face Recognition feature, and new users will have the feature disabled by default.

Face Recognition, for those unfamiliar, is used by Facebook to automatically scan for faces on pictures uploaded to the service. It then uses the data to notify users when they are in a photo but weren’t tagged, or when protecting against someone using your photo to impersonate you.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

The company will start notifying users about the setting on their News Feed starting today, giving them more information on how the feature works, how the data is used, etc. Existing users will then be able to turn it off from there, or keep it on if they want to. New users will likely be notified in a similar way, too.

“Facebook’s face recognition technology still does not recognize you to strangers. We don’t share your face recognition information with third parties. We also don’t sell our technology,” Facebook said, emphasising that the company doesn’t share your face recognition data with other companies.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 1 comments

  • Thom77

    04 September, 2019 - 8:58 am

    <p>The NSA must be near completion of their database of boomers.</p><p><br></p><p>"We also don’t sell our technology"</p><p><br></p><p>Of course not, you probably allow others to use it for free as long as you have access to the data.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC