Facebook on Tuesday said that its facial recognition technology applied to photos by default currently, will now be an opt-in feature. In a blog post, Facebook announced that its facial recognition technology will no longer identify new users in their photo by default and that the existing users have an option to opt-out of it from Facebook Settings. "Starting today, people who newly join Facebook or who previously had the tag suggestions setting will have the face recognition setting and will receive information about how it works. The tag suggestions setting, which only controls whether we can suggest that your friends tag you in photos or videos using face recognition will no longer be available," Facebook said. For the uninitiated, Facebook's facial recognition setting was previously called tag suggestions because Facebook claimed that it was only used to automatically suggest tags of your friends in photos.

Facebook Inc is opening up its face recognition technology to all users with an option to opt out, the social media company said, as it discontinued a related feature called "Tag Suggestions." The old feature enabled users to choose whether Facebook could suggest that their friends tag them in photos, without giving them control over other uses of the technology. The face recognition setting, available to some Facebook users since December 2017, has additional functions such as notifying account holders if their profile photo is used by someone else. People who opt in to the new setting will still have tag suggestions automatically generated about them. Facebook's face recognition technology has been at the center of a privacy related lawsuit since 2015.

Facebook has started to seek explicit consent from users for targeted advertising, storage of sensitive information, and – for the first time in the EU – application of facial recognition technology as the European general data protection regulation (GDPR) is due to come into force in just over a month. The company is only required to seek the new permissions in the European Union, but it plans to roll them out to all Facebook users, no matter where they live. The move follows Mark Zuckerberg's stated goal to apply the spirit of GDPR worldwide. When Facebook users log in during the coming weeks, they will be asked to agree to the company's updated terms of service, and to make specific choices in a number of areas defined by the new law. In a blogpost, Facebook executives Erin Egan and Ashlie Beringer said users would be asked to review information about targeted advertising, and to choose whether or not they want the social network to use data from partners to show them ads; to explicitly confirm whether they're happy to share "political, religious, and relationship information", which is defined as specially protected data under EU law; and to agree to the use of facial recognition technology, which Facebook says will be used to detect which pictures users are in and help protect them against strangers using their photos.

Facebook must face a class action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology, a California judge has ruled. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook gathered biometric information without users' explicit consent. It involves the "tag suggestions" technology, which spots users' friends in uploaded photos; the lawsuit says this breaches Illinois state law. Facebook said the case had no merit and it would fight it vigorously. On Monday, US District Judge James Donato ruled to certify a class of Facebook users - a key legal hurdle for a class action suit.

In recent days, more and more Facebook users started seeing a notification about how the social network uses its facial recognition technology. When Facebook first implemented the tech in 2013, it limited its use to suggesting tags in photos. In December, though, the company announced that it would expand face recognition's scope to notify you when someone added a photo you were in, whether it was tagged or not. If that sounds like something you'd rather Facebook not do, it's easy enough to stop. If you haven't yet encountered the new notification, it provides some detail about the change.

Facebook will soon begin alerting users of photos that feature them, based on facial recognition technology. Facebook is expanding its use of facial recognition software to alert users when photos of them are posted on the platform -- whether or not they are tagged in the photo. By default, Facebook users in the U.S. will be signed up for these face recognition alerts, unless they have previously opted out of a similar, more limited feature. But users can turn off face recognition, Facebook says. Additionally, the company says it will roll out new tools to alert users if someone else may be impersonating them with a misleading profile photo.

Facebook wants to make sure you know about and control the photos of you people upload, even if they don't tag you. So today, Facebook launched a new facial recognition feature called Photo Review that will alert you when your face shows up in newly posted photos so you can tag yourself, leave it be, ask the uploader to take the photo down, or report it to Facebook. The feature should give people confidence that there aren't pics of them floating around Facebook that they could see but just don't know about. It could also help thwart impersonation. But Facebook tells me it has no plans to use facial recognition to enhance ad targeting or content relevancy sorting, like showing you more News Feed posts from friends who post untagged photos of you or ads related to locations where you appear in untagged photos.

Artificial Intelligence (or AI for short) has become quite the buzzword recently. Everyone in the tech world seems to want to use it. A ton of different applications cropped up in the last couple of weeks, every more amazing than the last. We've seen AI that can tell us what it sees on an image, one that can suggest an answer based on an email contents and one that could tell us the weather if we ask the right questions. We wanted to check if there is any way we could use artificial intelligence in LiveChat to improve it in any way.