...Tagging Intrusions Made Easier...

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In this day and age, you always have to be on your toes when partaking in social outings. In the past, you could go out, make a fool of yourself by, say, walking around with food on your face or by falling in a swimming pool unexpectedly or, INSERT YOUR EMBARRASSING MEMORY HERE and, despite the shame you had to live with, generally speaking, people forgot about it and life went on. These days, however, with the advent of online photo sharing and, more importantly, photo tagging through such ubiquitous online services as Facebook, these forgotten moments can live on in infamy forever.

Most people are responsible enough to not post self-damaging photos of themselves online so the real danger for chronicling these unfortunate moments comes from our so-called 'Friends.' Recently, Facebook has made the job of tagging people in your photos much easier by using facial-recognition software to automatically tag your Facebook Friends in albums. Personally, I'm a little torn on this feature. I like the idea that this could save me time when tagging my own photos but, conversely, I foresee many incidental or incorrect tags which I would have to police and moderate very carefully.

As an example, I tried using the face recognition software in Picasa. For the most part, it's scarily effective at identifying many (though maybe not yet most) faces in a picture but there was one time I recall it being a little bit off the mark. For some personal, though primarily natural reasons, I shave my head. I am also very likely to wear sunglasses out in the sun. When Picasa auto-tagged an album from my visit to Canada last summer, it identified my good friend's two-year-old son - who, at the time, happened to be wearing sunglasses and still hadn't sprouted too much hair - as me.

Facebook is no stranger to privacy concerns and just when you think they must have learned by now, they go and release another new feature by making it a default feature that people have to turn off by navigating the ever changing privacy setting menu on Facebook rather than having users choose to enable the feature. I understand the line of thinking that if they didn't turn it on automatically, most users would never be aware of it and never use the feature but there are other ways of going about this.

In 2010, when Facebook launched a redesigned layout, I seem to recall that there were caption bubbles that would pop up to draw attention to the new features and a walk-through tour of the advantages of the new layout. Couldn't they do something like this? For instance, the next time a user uploads a photo or album, couldn't a similar dialogue bubble pop and say, "Hey! Would you like to make photo tagging even easier!?" and the proceed to show how a person might do that. This makes it seem like a positive new feature rather than another Facebook privacy infringement.

As I said earlier, I see both the advantages and disadvantages to this feature and until I've decided what best suits me, I think I will disable auto tagging and go from there. If you have any concerns, as always, carefully review your privacy settings on Facebook or any site on which you share personal information. It's easier to be over-cautious and then relinquish your privacy fears as they subside than to try to recover from over-indulging in technology that you're not fully certain about.