How to Disable Facebook's Facial Recognition Feature

Facebook can identify your face. Creepy or cool? You decide

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Updated on October 5, 2022

Facebook discontinued its face recognition feature in 2022 due to privacy concerns. This article is for archival purposes only.

This article explains how to adjust your privacy settings to disable Facebook's facial recognition feature.

Select the down-arrow icon in the upper-right corner.
Click Settings & Privacy.
Choose Privacy Shortcuts.
Under Privacy, select See more privacy settings.
From the left menu, select Face Recognition.
Next to the setting labeled, "Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?" select Edit.
Select the drop-down box that appears and choose No.

Why and How Does Facebook Use Face Recognition?

According to Facebook's help site, there are two ways Facebook uses its facial recognition technology:

To find photos and videos you're in so Facebook can help you review or share content, suggest tags, and provide relevant content and feature recommendations.
To protect you and others from impersonation and identity misuse and improve platform reliability.

Currently, photo tagging appears to be the only thing that Facebook uses its facial recognition technology for, but this may change in the future as other uses are discovered.

Testing done by some reviewers has found the technology to be less than accurate. In Europe, Facebook was required to delete European users' facial recognition data due to privacy concerns.

The best advice for dealing with any Facebook privacy concerns you may have is to check your privacy settings at least once a month to see if there is something that you were opted-in to that you would rather opt-out of.

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