Facebook to roll out tools to manage facial recognition

Worried about someone using Facebook's facial recognition technology to replace their profile picture with your face? Now there's a setting for that.

The social media giant will soon roll out "optional tools to help people better manage their identity on Facebook using face recognition," according to a blog post by Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, its director of applied machine learning.

The setting is refreshingly simple within Facebook's app. It asks: "Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?" You can choose "Yes" or "No."

Facebook has used facial recognition technology on photos posted to the site since 2010 to automatically detect and name faces. Previous settings were more complex and made users select (or not) different facial recognition features.

If you do opt in to facial recognition, Facebook has a new feature to "help you find photos that you're not tagged in and help you detect when others might be attempting to use your image as their profile picture." They include the ability "to choose whether to tag yourself, leave yourself untagged or reach out to the person who posted the photo if you have concerns about it," according to Candela's post.

The new settings will appear on Facebook platforms everywhere, with the exception of Canada and the E.U., where the company doesn't offer facial recognition.

This article was originally published on CNET, titled, "Now you can tell Facebook to ignore your face."