Facebook has disabled face recognition in Europe (for new users)

EU authorities have long been negotiating with Facebook because of numerous violations of laws on the protection of user data. A year ago, an Austrian law student, Mark Shrems, asked the company CD with the information collected on it and found there deleted messages, chat sessions, names of former friends and other data marked deleted: true - this is a gross violation of European law. The student sent another 22 different requests to Facebook: separately for each item of questionable site functionality that could violate European law. He also launched a Europe campaign against Facebook . As a result, the student managed to initiate an official audit of Facebook by the European authorities, which brought some results.

Facebook has been auditing the Irish commissioner for the protection of user data , Billy Hawkes (Billy Hawkes), because it is registered in Dublin European representation Facebook. Six months ago, he sent a number of recommendations to the social network to improve Facebook’s rules for protecting user data. And now Facebook has agreed to satisfy some of the requirements, including turning off the automatic recognition of friends in photos (Tag Suggest function) for new users from the European Union.

A 74-page Facebook audit report is published here .

Automatic face recognition is only a small part of the privacy violations that Facebook is charged with. Some public organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, consider Facebook’s commercial approach to serving a social network to be fundamentally wrong. For example, the legendary founder of the software freedom movement, Richard Stallman, has put together an entire dossier on Facebook , including cases of user privacy violations, the description of inappropriate practices for using Like buttons for mass surveillance, and much more. In one of the discussions, Richard Stallman spoke very categorically: “Facebook is an international parasitic project. There are many ethically acceptable ways to communicate with people. For example, you can use a separate site or a WordPress blog. ”

Prominent activist Julian Assange called Facebook "the most disgusting spy system created in the history of mankind."

Nevertheless, the Irish commissioner Billy Hawks was generally satisfied with the results of the Facebook check .