Facebook photo tagging bane or boon

Is it cool or creepy that Facebook is recognizing your pictures, adding you to a database, and judging you!

Personally I shut it off. Sure it might help your friends tag you easier and maybe even offer name suggestions for your pictures but at what cost? Think of your face map floating around the internet, atm machines, grocery store cameras, even car cameras will be able to identify you!

Yet another one of the great reasons Facebook is free. Now they have your FACE, whats next…retinal signatures or maybe your fingerprints extrapolated from a photograph?

If you want to disable Facebook photo tagging / Facebook facial recognition, do this:

– Go to “Account” on the upper right side of Facebook and choose “Privacy Settings” from the drop-down menu.
– Choose “Customize Settings.”
– Then pick “Suggest photos of me to friends.”
– Click “Edit Settings” and choose “Disabled” and click “Okay.”
(taken from http://blogs.reuters.com)

Read the whole story at Facebook photo tagging: Cool or creepy? | Reuters Wealth

Who is Facebook sharing your info with, and how to shut it off. UPDATE

With all the changes to Facebook’s privacy settings it worth pointing out that even if you turn off your “Instant Personalization” settings you are STILL sharing your info with some other websites. You have to go to each application specifically and block it. Luckily there are groups out there like the EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation which keeps tabs on these sorts of things.

It makes no sense why they force people to share their info with websites/apps/services that have you have no interest in. I know why they do it, what I’m saying is that there’s a better way. If I’m not interested in sharing with those websites/apps/services and I receive an email from them…it becomes SPAM to me. I filter it, label it as SPAM, and now it gets treated as such from that moment on. In a nutshell Facebook is contributing to the MASS amounts of SPAM you get every single day.

The better way is for Facebook to simplify and consolidate the sharing options, let me know who is getting my info, and who they share it with. Facebook is like an STD these days. Once you share your info with them, anyone who they share with now has your info, and anyone that THEY share with, etc. etc.

Maybe they should be forced to put up a way to track the sharing. Like the “Sex Calculator” that tells how many indirect sex partners you’ve had. That way we could see how far our personal information has been spread around the maaaaagical internets.

If Facebook adds a new partner to their “sharing list” they should be forced to tell you when you log in…”Hey TJ Allard, would you like to share your info with our new partner “Company you have never heard of” select yes or no”

Their partner list is really hard to find. Are they trying to hide something, by giving it a long name and burying it in their FAQ’s? C’mon WTF?! They call it Social plugins and instant personalization pilot program FAQ #17103 Plus, there’s no RSS feed so that I can get updates to the list when it changes.

If you didn’t know EXACTLY what to search for, you would have never found it. It all just seems kinda shady to me.

As of this posting, Facebook is sharing your info with:
yelp.com
docs.com
pandora.com

EFF has very simple instructions on how to block them, and a little video. Unfortunately you can’t set it up to keep blocking any new partner sites. You will have to visit Facebook’s awesome FAQ#17103 to keep up to date. Unless of course they add a new FAQ# every time they add a new partner.

Here’s the link to EFF’s instructions.
How to Opt Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Hope this helps.