Facebook is launching a facial-recognition system.

Facebook is launching a facial-recognition system.  For the system to work, Facebook will scan all images posted to Facebook and suggest names of people who appear in them. According to CNN, users can opt-out, but your photos will be scanned nonetheless:

Starting in a few weeks, the system will scan all images posted to Facebook and suggest the names of people who appear in the frame. Last year, Facebook began rolling the facial-recognition feature out to a test group.

Facebook’s more than 500 million users have been automatically included in the database, but the company is allowing each person to choose whether to be identified by toggling a pane in the account’s privacy settings.

The tool would still scan that person’s face and figure out who it is, but it won’t display that information. People can still manually tag friends.

Not everybody’s happy about this. Security firm Sophos expressed concern that Facebook’s facial-recognition technology had been turned on by default, PCMag.com reports:

“Now might be a good time to check your Facebook privacy settings as many Facebook users are reporting that the site has enabled the option in the last few days without giving users any notice,” Sophos’ Graham Cluley wrote in a blog post.

The social-networking site acknowledged that it should have been more communicative about the service’s roll-out, but did not announce plans to make it opt-in.

If you don’t want facial recognition turned on, go to your Facebook account’s privacy settings, click on “Customize settings,” go to “Things others share” and find the option for “Suggest photos of me to friends.” To see if it’s enabled, click “Edit Settings” and the box should either say “enabled” or “disabled.”

European Union regulators are investigating the facial-recognition feature, Bloomberg reports:

Facebook Inc. will be probed by data- protection regulators from the 27-nation European Union over a feature that uses a facial-recognition program to automatically suggest people’s names to tag in pictures.

“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default,” said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Such automatic tagging “can bear a lot of risks for users” and the group will “clarify to Facebook that this can’t happen like this.