If you have not logged into your Facebook account for some time, I suggest that you do so now. Once you are logged-in, click the "Photos" tab on your Facebook profile and what you see there might surprise you.
It’s your own personal photo album on Facebook but none of these pictures of odd-looking cartoon characters, horoscope charts, photo collages, friend graphs, etc. have been uploaded by you.
What photo tagging applications can do to your Facebook profile
The culprit, as you may have guessed, are these Facebook applications that tag random images with your name and the tagged image therefore shows up in your Facebook profile page without you doing anything.
What’s the problem?
These "collages" not only make your Facebook profile look very unprofessional but there’s something else to worry about as well.
Some photo tagging applications on Facebook (as the one below) add links to bad sites in "your" photos and your innocent Facebook friends, who are just randomly browsing your pictures, might fall in the trap.
What can you do?
The simple way is that you remove your name tag from the tagged photo and it will be instantly removed from your Facebook photo album as well.
Next you should find the Facebook application that you friend used to create that photo collage in the first place and block that application forever so that your other friends are unable to use that application to spam your Facebook profile page.
Also make sure that you get notifications each time someone tags you in a photo. You can control this setting from the "Notifications" tab on the Account Settings page.
Photo tagging is the one of the most popular features on Facebook and, probably for this reason, Facebook doesn’t offer a simple setting that will prevent other users and applications from tagging you in photographs. You can however hide "photos tagged of you" from the privacy page so that the images don’t appear in your public photo albums and are visible only to you.
And as a precautionary measure, visit the authorized apps pages to make sure that you haven’t authorized any Facebook app to tag images of other people on your behalf. If you find one, just click the cross to remove that Facebook app from your profile permanently.
What can Facebook do?
When you are tagged in a photo by your friends (or a Facebook application), the tag is automatically approved and the picture appears in your profile. All we therefore need is an extra privacy setting that would let us to approve tags before a tagged photo appears on our profile page.
Facebook won’t let developers add apps to your profile without permission then why do they allow them to add pictures to your profile without asking.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/facebook-photo-tags-problem/11355/
Tags: Archives, facebook, Most Popular, opinion, Internet
Reader Comments
Worst part, if my friend comments on his friend’s photo I’ll be able to see the whole album even though I’m not in my friend’s friend’s friend list.
Written by Suresh on 12.01.09
True. They are really irksome-waste a lot of time and energy and also my interest in Facebook.
Written by Manuj Darshan on 12.01.09
Thanks for letting us know. Will alert my friends too…
Written by Sheik on 12.01.09
Worst part there are about 40-50 reply on such pics every day … and fb sends a notification for each of dem … !!!
Written by gaurav on 12.01.09
Some of the information you put on here is really useful – and I totally agree with your comments about FB and tagging. Do you though know how to stop someone putting up a post of something one has said to a friend along with a picture which has been ‘taken’ without my permission from one of my albums? I need to know how to stop people becoming friends without permission and therefore gaining access to my information without my knowledge or permission.
Any ideas please?
Written by Hilary on 12.01.09
i work for a reputed Antivirus comapny. I daily come across various cases where people get rootkit/virus infections from facebook.
So be aware of clicking on any pop ups from facebook.
These virus from facebook might cause URL redirections for some secure websites like Antivirus websites ..Be careful while using facebook..
just chat and communicate with facebook ..do not click on any pop ups..
Written by nana on 12.01.09
I agree, also it gives you access to the photos of people who r not in ur friend list !
Written by Rohit on 12.01.09