Facebook faces fresh privacy palaver over face recognition for photo tagging

Facebook is in hot water over privacy again -- and this time it's your face that's in the frame. The social network is in trouble after quietly turning on face recognition and 'Tag Suggestions' in photos.

Facebook now uses facial recognition to suggest tags for your photos. Upload new pictures, and Facebook will automatically tag faces it recognises. The system's pretty clever, picking out your friends in many photos, so tagging a large batch of snaps is less of a pain in the wotsit. But some see it as an invasion of privacy.

Some tech pundits and Facebook users have thrown their toys out of the pram over the way facial recognition has been turned on by default, without so much as a 'by your leave, thank you very much'.

To turn automatic fizzog-tagging off, click on your privacy settings and edit the option to 'suggest photos of me to friends'. Yeah, make your friends click on your face manually in every single photo -- that'll learn 'em to go round taking photos of you willy-nilly.

We're with Facebook on this one. Tagging is cool and, with over 100 million tags added every day, it seems most users agree. Cameras have had face-recognition capability for years, and we just can't think of any negative implications of Facebook knowing what we look like. After all, we've already told it every other darn thing there is to know about ourselves.

Poor Facebook can't do anything right. It's been in trouble over privacy loads of times already, due to, for example, Facebook Places, handing out your phone number, and just being too darn complicated. Mark Zuckerberg's company tried to deflect negative attention with a smear campaign against Google, but that backfired too.

Has Facebook lost face yet again, or is this a fuss about nothing? Let us know in the comments section below or on our Facebook page.