Roll Out of Face Recognition Facebook Feature Causes Mostly Unwarranted Criticism

The web is all abuzz about the latest Facebook privacy 'mishap' and is discussing all of the implications, or lack thereof, of Facebook's face recognition technology. This despite the fact that the technology is six months old and that it's not really that big of a deal in the first place.

Back in December, Facebook debuted a feature which scanned all uploaded photos attempting to recognize the people in them.

Those uploading the photos are then asked to confirm that the algorithm did its job and can tag their friends in the photos faster.

Tagging in Facebook Photos has always been a sore spot for some users, it was the one killer feature of the Photos section, which in turn was one of the first killer features of Facebook.

But many people are sensitive about photos of them and where they show up, especially when they are linked (tagged) to them.

The new functionality is an extension of that, Facebook doesn't automatically tag the photos, all it does is scan them to recognize the people, making it easier for their friends to tag them.

This, in turn, should increase tagging activity on Facebook which should lead to even higher engagement, which is something that the site is always striving for.

The problem this time around is that the suggestion feature is enabled by default and users have to specifically go through their privacy settings and disable it if they don't want to be suggested to their friends.

This along with the fact that Facebook rolled out the functionality to new countries outside of the US without notifying anyone gives some credence to the new criticism.

Facebook admitted that it could have done a better job communicating the wider roll out and has updated the initial post announcing the feature.

"We've been rolling Tag Suggestions out over the last several months and this feature is now available in most countries. We'll continue to post updates here as the roll-out progresses," Facebook said in the update.

"We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them," a Facebook spokesperson added separately.