Oneupweb Reviews: Facebook’s New Photo Tagging Policy

Has this ever happened to you? You receive a Facebook notification that you’ve been tagged in a photo (hooray, someone loves you). On further investigation though, you realize that you aren’t in the photo.

Either an app or a friend, just wanted to get you to think you were, so you would go searching for the tagged picture of yourself.

This situation, and many like it, have lead Facebook to make some recent changes to their stream publishing policy. Let’s take a look at these new policy changes, and see if they help crack down on these problems. The new policy states:

“You can tag a photo only with the express consent of the user on whose behalf you are doing the tagging, and must only tag images when the tag accurately labels what is depicted in the image.” (DPP V.13)

Facebook further added in a recent blog post about the policy changes:

“Photo tagging should be used to tag a photo of the real individual in a real photo, and must not be used in collages, with avatars, or for marketing or promotional purposes.”

This change in policy will now prompt users to accept or deny someone from tagging them in a photo. Even if you’re in the photo, and simply don’t want your name to be associated with it, you now have the option to deny being tagged.

It’s hard to believe that Facebook has gone without a feature like this for so long. I have seen several groups requesting that Facebook do something about this spam problem. Unfortunately the apps that use tagging to create viral buzz, are out of luck on this one. But overall the change in policy puts the power back in the hands of the user. And as MySpace learned the hard way, if you don’t crack down on spam, people will migrate to greener pastures.

So for cracking down on spam and abuse, we give Facebook’s new photo tagging policy an…

Official Oneupweb Review: Thumbs Up