How to stop Facebook from looking for you with face recognition

Assuming you haven’t completely erased Facebook from your life and have instead chosen to carefully inspect your privacy settings and limit what Facebook has on you, I’m going to offer another piece of optional advice. If you’re generally distrustful of the social network, you might want to think about disabling the company’s face recognition technology. Facebook has been using face recognition for years to make suggestions of who should be tagged in photos you share. But now it’s using those capabilities in new ways. Let’s examine what they are, and you can decide for yourself whether you want Facebook to keep looking for your mug.

It’s probably best to just let Facebook explain it:

Our technology analyzes the pixels in photos you’re already tagged in and generates a string of numbers we call a template. When photos and videos are uploaded to our systems, we compare those images to the template.

When you disable face recognition, Facebook says it deletes your template.

Here’s what it looks like when you get a face recognition notification:

To Facebook’s credit, the company has tried to be very upfront about this expanded use of face recognition. You might’ve already gotten a prompt that explains the added ways that Facebook is utilizing it of late.

Okay, I don’t want this enabled anymore. How do I turn it off?

On your phone, go to your own profile page, then tap the “More” icon — a circle with three dots in the middle. From there, choose “More Settings” and then finally tap on Face Recognition. Make sure “Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?” is set to no. Facebook claims it’s honoring previous user privacy preferences here; if you’ve already turned off tag suggestions at some point, face recognition should theoretically be disabled when you check this setting. And if you had the tagging thing on, Facebook thinks you’re fine with the new ways it’s putting face recognition to use.

Can I leave face recognition enabled for photo tag suggestions but turn off the other stuff?

No. It’s all or nothing. Facebook says users prefer a simplified, single switch to control all face recognition settings.

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