Facebook says its facial recognition tech will no longer identify new users in their photos by default; all users can now opt out via a Face Recognition setting
Cambridge was what registered on everyone's radar but facial recognition was a part of it, too. https://twitter.com/... Paul Stamatiou / @stammy : here's the direct URL to opt-out of Facebook face recognition 👇 https://www.facebook.com/... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Scott Monty / @scottmonty : Wouldn't the more ethical way be to allow users to opt in, rather than requiring them to opt out of something you forced on them? https://twitter.com/... Joanna Stern / @joannastern : Well, isn't that nice. https://twitter.com/... John Paczkowski / @johnpaczkowski : Update: “We Are Doing What We Should Have Done In The First Place” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This reversal closes a loop Facebook opened when it launched facial recognition photo alerts in December 2017 and spent early 2018 notifying more users into the feature. By May 2019 the governance was visibly fraying: Consumer Reports found the opt-out setting missing for some users, nearly 18 months after it was promised.
The new move flips the default itself — new users are no longer identified in photos automatically — but keeps consent one-directional, which is exactly what Scott Monty's widely-shared objection targets: an opt-out still assumes the feature was forced on people first.
First-order effects
- Every user gets a single Face Recognition setting to control the feature, while anyone who never opted in will no longer have their face scanned and matched in newly uploaded photos.
- Facebook immediately shrinks the pool of faces its systems can recognize, weakening the tag-suggestion and untagged-photo-alert capabilities it built the feature around.
Second-order effects
- Journalists like Joanna Stern and John Paczkowski framed the change skeptically on arrival, hardening the press norm that biometric features must be judged on consent mechanics rather than convenience — raising the cost of the announce-first rollout tactic New York Magazine documented months later.
- Privacy advocates and regulators gain a worked example that opt-out defaults for face data are politically untenable at platform scale, pressuring rivals running similar tag-suggestion systems toward the same concession.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, biometric features converge on explicit opt-in as the industry standard, with defaults — not settings menus — becoming the real regulatory battleground for face data.
- Facebook's own later behavior, like training the SEER model on data deliberately excluding EU Instagram images, suggests consent-by-default is becoming an engineering constraint baked into how its AI datasets are assembled, not just a settings page.
The trend: Consumer-facing facial recognition is moving from silently-on with opt-outs to explicit user consent as privacy backlash and regulatory exposure compound.