08 June 2011 | Author: N. Hamilton Media copywriter

Facebook rolls out facial recognition globally - and faces privacy rows

An IT security firm has let slip that Facebook's quietly rolled out facial recognition software to automate photo tagging globally, leaving Palo Alto to face privacy watchdogs who've criticised the social network for failing to alert users to changes to their privacy settings.

According to CNet.com, a report from security firm Sophos yesterday alerted privacy watchdogs to the global roll-out of Facebook's facial recognition tool, prompting Facebook to talk-up the feature while responding to privacy concerns.

Facebook said its facial recognition technology - already launched stateside as of December - will relieve users or the "chore" of manually tagging multiple shots by scanning and automatically tagging recognised faces and friends.

"Every day, people add more than 100 million tags to photos on Facebook," the social network said in an official blog post. "While tags are an essential tool for sharing important moments, many of you have said tagging photos can be a chore."

The face recognition feature, Facebook added, "will make tagging multiple photos even more convenient."

Chester Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at Sophos, criticised Facebook's move to introduce the change by stealth:

"This is their [Facebook's] standard method," he said. "They do it secretly and see if the uproar is loud enough. Previously, they've made addresses and phone numbers available to developers but backed out once people made a ruckus about it. This time, they tested [the facial recognition feature] out on Americans, who are the least privacy-aware."

"You're not a customer, you're a product," the security expert said. "With this facial-recognition feature, photos will be automatically indexed, which will help information spread more quickly."

Facebook, in response, has apologised for being slow to alert users to the roll out.

"When we announced this feature last December, we explained that we would test it, listen to feedback, and iterate before rolling it out more broadly," a Facebook spokesman told CNet.com. "We should have been more clear with people during the rollout process when this became available to them."

Users can disable automatic photo tagging by amending their Facebook privacy settings.

However, Facebook users won't be able to block tagging altogether, and will have to manually un-tag themselves from photos that have been uploaded and tagged by friends.

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