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Comment by ryusage | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who doesn't see any big deal over this feature? Normally, I'd be all upset about them forcing an opt-out approach, but I just don't really see this as changing your level of privacy at all.

If it's a friend of yours, and they're uploading a picture of you, well then what do you care if FB removes one step for them? I think most people already tag everything anyway, don't they?

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I may be wrong, but the impression I'm getting is that people are offended that facebook have used the photos that have people tagged them in as data for training their facial recognition software without them agreeing to it.

It's the fact that they now have the power to determine whether you're in a photo, any photo, or even any video, anywhere in the world, that has people worried. What might facebook end up doing with that?

Of course there was nothing stopping them doing this without it being obvious to anyone.

Got it. That does make sense; the article and comments just didn't really seem like that was specifically what people were worried about. Given that I see no other reason to care, though, I assume you're correct.

Personally, I'm not so worried about Facebook being able to recognize me. I'd be more concerned about to whom they might give that data. I can definitely see room for a lot of concern there.

As someone who tags a lot of friends on facebook, I love this feature. It was so painful to tag even 5 people over even a 20 photos album. I don't think this is any kind of privacy violation. Moreover, desktop apps like picasa have had brilliant image recognition abilities for a long time. The only thing I want fb to do is to give me an option to stop being tagged by apps without explicit permission.

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