The latest news from Facebook is that it is developing a new technology to recognize faces in uploaded photos -- it will be able to tell which parts of the photo represent people, and prompt users to tag them with their friends' names.
In essence, this is yet another feature that will make the overall social networking process easier for users, saving a small fraction of time and effort that would be spent to click on people's faces. However, now that it will be that much simpler to tag people's photos, we might want to take another look at how this may effect privacy and one's online persona. Clearly, there is nothing about this feature that will create major privacy changes. However, by being prompted to tag photos, I wonder if users may find themselves identifying friends in pictures they would have otherwise left alone, whether out of laziness or out of discretion. For example, I have some friends that will tag people in party photos selectively, depending on whether they are currently students or whether they have an office job (the assumption being that students can always untag themselves later, but those who have jobs may have Facebook connections with colleagues who shouldn't see this kind of material). Will this change if tagging becomes easier, and will people have less discretion about whom they tag in what photos, because of the increased simplicity?
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3 comments:
Good post and reminded me about the shirtless Jon Favreau pictures at Old Glory showing him playing beer pong or whatever. Not exactly the image that Obama's speechwriter wants to cultivate but also not the first time his friends posted questionable pictures of him. Shows how much lack of control there is even for a guy in communications!
I think facial recognition will definitely make tagging more popular because of the ease. Tagging is tedious, but if Facebook does the work for you, than why not take advantage of it? I would hope that people won't be lazy and let Facebook tag friends they know do not want to be identified, but I could certainly see it happening.
Just like they do with any Facebook change, users will have to adapt. They could begin by setting their photo privacy settings to "friends only" or even "no one." Still, even if you have set your privacy settings to the extreme (or even if you weren't tagged in the first place!) those photos still exist on Facebook. This just goes to show that the only way to avoid your photographs ending up in the wrong hands is to make sure they're not uploaded to Facebook in the first place. If only it were that simple....
This brings up an interesting point. You can micro-manage your privacy settings, but you can never fully control what others will do. Even completely removing yourself from social media puts you at risk because then you can't keep tabs on what's being tagged with your name online. A friend who means no harm could certainly put you in a bad position by tagging you in a picture you wouldn't want your employer to see.
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