In recent days, more and more Facebook users started seeing a notification about how the social network uses its facial recognition technology. When Facebook first implemented the tech in 2013, it limited its use to suggesting tags in photos. In December, though, the company announced that it would expand face recognition's scope to notify you when someone added a photo you were in, whether it was tagged or not. If that sounds like something you'd rather Facebook not do, it's easy enough to stop.

If you haven't yet encountered the new notification, it provides some detail about the change. "You control face recognition," the message reads, popping up in your News Feed and explaining that the platform now has three main goals for the tech: surfacing photos of you that you haven't been tagged in, flagging situations where someone you don't seem to know uses a photo of you in their profile (perhaps to impersonate or troll you), and improving the photo-browsing experience for people with visual impairments. It then gives you a tailored explanation of whether your account is currently set to have the feature on or off.

"Using facial recognition to help the visually impaired or as a tool to identify and combat cyber harassment is notable, because the positive uses of facial recognition technology are pretty limited to fun and maybe authentication," says Woodrow Hartzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University who studies privacy and data protection. "It's interesting now to see different uses. We collectively need to watch that to see how it plays out."

Many Facebook users will end up subjecting their photos to bulk face-recognition scanning for little personal benefit—simply making tagging slightly easier. And least the company seems to strike a decent balance between utility and privacy.

"They won’t identify you using face recognition to people who couldn’t identity you in real life, and that to me seems like the right line," says Chris Calabrese, vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology. "I personally am comfortable with face tagging in this very circumscribed context, but only in that context where it’s to someone who would already recognize you. If we cross that line, face recognition could rapidly spin out of control and that could be really problematic."

Facebook

If you're not comfortable with Facebook's new face recognition tools, you can head to Settings > Face Recognition, then select yes or no at the question Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos? And while Facebook says that it isn't opting everyone in, you may be surprised to find the feature already on.