As I was scrolling through Facebook on my desktop this very subtle, unassuming post showed up between the normal posts on my feed. At first I skimmed right over it, but then I went back to take a closer look. Introducing new features over a colorless post on my feed vs. though an email or through the brightly colored pinned feature posts at the very top of my feed seems like an odd way for Facebook to showcase this kind of information. It made me think that Facebook is required to update me on changes to their service but they’re almost hoping for me to miss it. Their language seems intentionally worded to scare me or guilt me into not turning off this feature. “Oh don’t worry, you are totally in control of everything on this website — at Facebook, we put the user in control….buuuuuut…….here’s why you should still do what we want anyway: if you turn this off people will steal your identity, you’ll be hurting disabled people, and what if you miss out on the next cool feature??” The Learn More page gives no more information about features using facial recognition (it’s the same message but with pretty illustrations of happy people) except it includes detailed steps on how to turn it off (and makes it seem a lot more complicated then it is).
It made me start thinking about how much Facebook knows what I look like. What “features” are they using this data for that they aren’t telling me about? Who else has access to this kind of information? Why do they want to be able to identify my face so badly? I decided to turn off the facial recognition feature, and I’m interested to see if it impacts my experience using Facebook in any way.
I think it’s interesting that you can choose to see fewer informational posts from Facebook or report their own post back to them.
Three posts later this article showed up on my feed…coincidence??