Want to disable Facebook facial recognition? Read this

Facebook is acquiring facial recognition firm Face.com, for an estimated $60 million.

Facebook already uses Face.com’s facial recognition technology to help it put a name to faces in photos uploaded to the social network. Now, with the acquisition of Face.com, the technology is coming in house.

So what does Facebook facial recognition actually do?

There are billions of photographs on Facebook’s servers. As your Facebook friends upload their pictures, Facebook will try to determine if any of the photos look like you. And if it finds what it believes to be a match, it may urge one of your Facebook friends to tag the photo with your name.

That’s what Facebook does with its facial recognition database right now. But nobody knows what it might do with it in the future.

Many people feel…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.