It’s well-known that the option to post photos online is the reason why Facebook is still the leading social networking site, especially with teens and tweens. According to statistics more than 200 million photos are uploaded on the site each day. And while your teen may be somewhat cautious of the photos they post and tag online—any incriminating or suggestive photos can be found by college admission officers, employers and predators— the social networking site may just become even more of a danger zone due to its new face recognition software.
The software, which digitally scans the faces of uploaded photos and uses facial recognition technology to identify a user’s “friends,” is technically designed to simplify the tagging process—it can become somewhat of a hassle to individually tag photos with large groups of people. But the software is stirring much controversy, especially because the technology enables a lot of “unwanted” tagged photos to pop up on friends’ Facebook walls and increases the chances of having incriminating photos permanently available online —not only does Facebook own the rights of all photos posted on the Web site, but once a photo is uploaded into cyberspace it is permanently there no matter if you delete them from the original source. Not to mention that the software has its issues; it’s only designed to suggest tags that it “thinks” matches a user’s friend’s face. It can accidently suggest a wrong person and there can be photos floating around in cyberspace that are misrepresenting who the person is.
Fortunately there are some ways that your teens can try to safeguard their reputation and protect photos from getting into the wrong hands (or from being seen by the wrong set of eyes). The first is to disable the face recognition software called “Tag Suggestions.” It’s important to note that disabling this feature will not prevent your teen’s friends from tagging them; it will only remove the automatic tag suggestion which will hopefully make your teen’s friends think twice before tagging an inappropriate photo. With that said, to disable the feature follow these directions:
1. Log-in and go to the home Facebook page.
2. Go to “Account” located on the top far right of the home page.
3. Go to “Privacy Setting.”
4. Go to “Customize Setting.”
5. Scroll down to the section that reads “Things Other Share” and click on “Edit Settings” next to “Suggest Photos of Me to Friends”
6. Click “Disable”
7. Click “Ok”
Other ways your teen can prevent unwanted tagged photos can include deleting (or blocking) friends that have no scruples when it comes to tagging unflattering or incriminating photos; or at least catching tagged photos early on and removing them. To do this, your teen should definitely request to have immediate notifications to be sent to his or her phone or via email. To do this, go to Account>Account Settings> Notifications > Scroll to “Photos” Section> Check either SMS or Email under the “Tags You in a Photo” section. If your teen uses the Facebook app on their cellphone, they can also change the notification settings to refresh every 30 minutes.
Additional note: Always remind teens to never befriend strangers on Facebook and to always protect photo albums by using the strongest “Friends Only” privacy setting.
Author Bio:
This guest post is contributed by Leslie Johnson, who writes about health, green living, parenting related articles at masters in health administration.
