Germany to sue Facebook over facial recognition

Earlier in the semester, I posted a blog post titled “Facebook’s Small Changes that Affects your Privacy”. The blog discussed Facebook’s new tagging features and the 3 dialogue box steps users now have to face when trying to un-tag a photo of them on Facebook. The blog also mentioned Facebook’s “facial- recognition system”, which recognizes faces of your friends and does the work for you. This system has not been implemented in Canada because Privacy Commissioner of Ontario is extremely against them system, along with other groups.

I wanted to share with you an article I came across today that was titled “Germany to sue Facebook over facial recognition”. Just like everyone probably expected this system has already spurred lawsuits. German data protection laws require companies to clearly inform users about how their personal information is being used. The Hamburg Data Protection Authority says Facebook did not inform it’s users when it began using facial recognition technology.

Facebook stated they would introduce a checkbox for users to accept terms and conditions about this system, and Facebook does not agree with the German authority because they state the tag suggestion feature is compliant with the E.U data protection laws. However, the checkbox would only be available for new users, which Germany felt was not a solution and is still looking into fining Facebook $407,000.

It will be interesting to see how this lawsuit turns out.

How would you feel if your face was recognized by this technology, and a photo you did not want tagged of yourself was tagged for everyone to see?

Full article: http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/germany-sue-facebook-over-facial-recognition-178787