European Union data-protection regulators will soon investigate Facebook over a recently added feature that uses face-recognition software to suggest tags of users in other people’s pictures without their permission, Bloomberg News reported.
Meanwhile, a privacy group in United States also plans to file a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Following in suite, authorities in both Britain and Ireland said they also plan to look into the new photo-tagging function that is causing such a stir.
The European Union’s watchdogs will closely study the Facebook feature for possible rule violations and take the appropriate actions in response.
To disable the function, users must go to account settings, manager privacy, customized settings (highlighted in blue), scroll down to “suggest photos of me to friends,” and then finally hit disable.
Facebook’s blog on Tuesday noted that “Tag Suggestions,” are now available in most countries over the last several months. Before this feature was added users could manually tag their pictures but this new feature takes the control out of the users hands.
“Since October, we’ve been working to make this process easier for you,” Facebook said on its blog. “First we added group tagging so you could type one name and apply it to multiple photos of the same person. Now we’re announcing tag suggestions, which will make tagging multiple photos even more convenient.”
Many Facebook users have commented that not only is the feature a violation of privacy but has often failed to work properly and has incorrectly tagged users.
