Facebook Facial Recognition and Follow Up

Welcome everyone! Glad you are taking a small amount of time to read this. First on the menu for today: Facebook Facial Recognition – It’s back. From Facebook on January 31st, 2013: “As we announced last year, we temporarily suspended our photo tag suggestion feature to make some technical improvements. Today, we’re re-enabling the feature in the United States so that people can use facial recognition to help them easily identify a friend in a photo and share that content with them. This is the same feature that millions of people previously used to help them quickly share billions of photos with friends and family.”

 

What does that mean to you and how can it affect you? If you are tagged, anyone searching for your name could see those pictures your friends posted, depending on your friend’s privacy settings. The key is the last part of the previous statement. But, you can control it yourself by not allowing anyone to tag you in a photo. Here’s how:  

1. On your Facebook page, click on the gear symbol in the upper right corner. On the drop down menu that appears, choose Privacy Settings.
2. In the left hand column, choose Timeline and Tagging.
3. Under the the “How can I manage tags people add and tagging suggestions” subheader look for the “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?”
4. Click on the EDIT button next to that last section and change the option to “No one.”

Here’s the important thing: Facebook is a “social’ site. That’s what it was created for and built on. If you don’t want certain things “out there” – don’t post them. It’s pretty simple when you actually take a moment and think about it. Remember, you control your own privacy – Facebook doesn’t. Second course: Java remains a big problem. As I talked about in my last blog post, Java has a problem. In fact it is serious enough that it contributed, in part, to the recent t take-over of Burger King’s Twitter account. Not from Burger King’s end, but from Twitter itself. The actual take-over was a three part approach, but the Java exploit played a part in it.

Remember, Java is not Javascript, which is part of Windows and cannot be removed easily. Javascript is used by your web browsers to work. You can find out if you have Java on your computer by going to your Add/Remove Programs and checking for entries/programs with Java in the name. My advice is to uninstall them. They are not needed for 98-99% of the time. If you do happen to run across something that needs it, you will be notified. At that point, it’s up to you whether or not you put it back on your computer. Until next time, Rob