Photo recognition raises Facebook privacy fears

FACEBOOK has quietly upgraded its technology to automatically recognise people in photos, renewing concerns about the privacy practices of the world’s top social networking service.

The feature, which Facebook automatically enables for users, has been expanded from the United States to “most countries”, Facebook’s official blog said.

Its “Tag Suggestions” feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labelling friends and acquaintances that appear in photos posted to Facebook.

The company’s roll-out of the technology has raised eyebrows in some circles. Internet security consultant firm Sophos wrote on its company blog that many Facebook users are reporting the site has enabled the facial recognition option in the past few days without giving any notice.

“Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth,” wrote Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos.

Facebook, which in December announced it planned to introduce the service in the US, acknowledged the feature was now more widely available.

When asked about the Sophos blog, Facebook said in an emailed statement that “we should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them”.

The statement noted that the photo-tagging suggestions are only made when new photos are added to Facebook, that only friends are suggested and that users can disable the feature in their privacy settings.

The company did not respond to requests for further comment.

While other photo software and online services — such as Google Inc’s Picasa and Apple Inc’s iPhoto — use facial recognition technology, the technology’s use on a social network like Facebook, which boasts more than 500 million users, could raise thorny privacy issues.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the non-profit privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said Apple’s iPhoto gave users control over facial recognition technology by letting them elect whether or not to use the technology in their personal photo collections.

Facebook’s system, by contrast, operates independently, analysing faces across a broad swathe of newly uploaded photos.

Rotenberg said such a system raised questions about which personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, would become associated with the photos in Facebook’s database. He criticised Facebook’s decision to automatically enable the technology for Facebook users.

“I’m not sure that’s the setting that people would want to choose,” he said.

“A better option would be to let people opt in.”