Facebook seems to be following ahead its promise of transforming into a more privacy-focused company, and it’s making a major change to its service this week. The company will soon notify existing users of its Face Recognition feature, and new users will have the feature disabled by default.

Face Recognition, for those unfamiliar, is used by Facebook to automatically scan for faces on pictures uploaded to the service. It then uses the data to notify users when they are in a photo but weren’t tagged, or when protecting against someone using your photo to impersonate you.

The company will start notifying users about the setting on their News Feed starting today, giving them more information on how the feature works, how the data is used, etc. Existing users will then be able to turn it off from there, or keep it on if they want to. New users will likely be notified in a similar way, too.

“Facebook’s face recognition technology still does not recognize you to strangers. We don’t share your face recognition information with third parties. We also don’t sell our technology,” Facebook said, emphasising that the company doesn’t share your face recognition data with other companies.

Tagged with Face Recognition, Facebook, Privacy