Change These Facebook Settings to Protect Your Photos From Facial Recognition Software
Unsurprisingly, any content you offer on the Internet for public consumption can be retrieved and misused by anyone smart enough to do so. While that doesn’t make The New York Times’ report this weekend any less judgmental, it’s a great reminder of how important it is to really go through the settings for various social media platforms and limit how your content, or maybe, is available to everyone.
I will not go into the Times report; it is worth reading separately as it has a company (Clearview AI) cleaning up over three billion images from millions of websites, including Facebook, and building a facial recognition app that does a pretty solid job of identifying people from images from this massive database data.
While Clearview’s cleanup methods technically violate the terms of service on a number of websites, it doesn’t stop the company from collecting images in droves. And it saves whatever it finds, which means keeping all your online data private won’t help if Clearview has already scanned and captured your photos.
However, something is better than nothing. On Facebook, which is probably the largest repository of your images, you need to go to Settings> Privacy and look for the described option: Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?
Turn this off and Clearview will not be able to capture your images. I admit, I would have expected this is not the kind of setting that makes me go through all my social networks and rethink how the information I share with them flows into the big network.
Block your Facebook even more with these settings
Since we’re already here, it’s worth taking a few minutes to review your Facebook settings and make sure as much of your content is set up just for friends. This includes changing Who Can See Your Future Posts to Friends, using the Restrict Past Posts option to change anything you previously posted to friends only, and ensuring that only you can see your Friends List – to prevent any potential collection of data and links that a third party may try to take. Likewise, make sure that only your friends (or friends of friends) can find you by your email address or phone number. (You will never know!)
Then you should visit the settings page “ Timeline and tags “ and make a few more changes. This only includes allowing friends to see what other people are posting to your timeline, as well as the posts you are tagged in. And since I’m a little bit scrupulous about all the crap people tag me on Facebook, I would include “View” options too. It won’t help your account get cleaned up, but it’s a great way to take more control over your timeline.
Finally, even if it also does not prevent the company to clear your account, go to “ Visitor Publications “ on the Facebook settings page, and restrict who is allowed to subscribe to you (if you want). You should also limit the number of people who can comment on or like your publicly available information, such as posts or other information about your life that you openly share on the service.
What then when I fix Facebook?
Here’s the annoying part. If I were in your shoes, I would take in the afternoon or evening and write down all the different places where I usually share excerpts from my life on the Internet. For the majority, perhaps, these are several social services: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc.
Once you’ve created your list, I would dive deeper into the settings for each service and see what options, if any, you have for limiting the availability of your content. This can be at odds with the way you use the service – if you’re trying to get a lot of Instagram followers, such as blocking your profile as “private” and requiring potential followers to request access, it could slow down your attempts to become the next big Insta. -star. However, it should also prevent anyone with a clever cleansing utility from bulk uploading your photos (and linking them to you, either with some fancy facial recognition technology or linking them to your account). ).
Can you completely prevent the creation of a large new database of searchable images? Probably no. But the most important lesson we can learn from situations like this — well… the existence of Clearview AI — is that you need to understand the nuances of the services you share your information with, and you should always use your settings to restrict access. to your data in any way convenient for you. If I were you, I would be mistaken that “let the trusted people see what I am doing, and not anyone else on the Internet,” but that’s just me.