I like Facebook a lot, and spend significant social media time there talking to people and otherwise engaging in the usual social media voyeurism. What was very cool today though was the “needs review” tag that is automatically opt-in rather than the usual don’t sweat it you have to manually figure out how to opt-in on this. Facebook is doing the right thing here, because I get tagged in some pretty obnoxious pictures that have nothing to do with me.
We have all seen them, the perennial taggers who decide to tag a wide swath of people for a picture, even though the picture does not have anyone in it. Another abuse of social systems to try to get page views or in some cases injects malware into someone’s computer. The new approve tagging feature looks like the right thing to do for Facebook right now. Facebook has always had problems with privacy because user data is just too important to their economic model to give up willingly.
Is this a new series of choices being made on Facebook’s part? Will other social media systems follow suit? Google Plus suffers from the same thing; you can tag someone in a picture even if it is not really them, regardless of what the picture is about. Approving these kinds of tags for pictures and articles is going to be very important for people to control their own public image.
In the longer run, you are the image that you have on Facebook or Google Plus, being able to have some control over that is going to be very important for a very long time.
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too bad the piece of crap “needs review” function doesn’t work
The “needs review” function does not work. It keeps telling you to review stuff that you can’t even see, even if you disable the review function in your privicy settings!