We present a novel way to apply the singularity confinement property as a discrete integrability criterion. We shall use what we call a full deautonomization approach, which consists in treating the free parameters in the mapping as functions of the independent variable, applied to a mapping complemented with terms that are absent in the original mapping but which do not change the singularity structure. We shall show, on a host of examples including the well-known mapping of Hietarinta–Viallet, that our approach offers a way to compute the algebraic entropy for these mappings exactly, thereby allowing one to distinguish between the integrable and non-integrable cases even when both have confined singularities.