The German government is unhappy with Facebook's Tag Suggestions face recognition service



    More recently, the social network Facebook launched a facial recognition system in photographs, called Tag Suggestions. This service recognizes the face in the photo added by the user, and invites the user to mark all friends. In general, the service is quite interesting, and for some users it may even seem indispensable. But German officials responsible for observing the rights and freedoms of their citizens believe that Tag Suggestions violates both German and European laws regarding privacy.

    In principle, any user can turn off the Tag Suggestions function in the security settings, but the Germans want this function to not be used at all if it comes to German citizens. In addition, European human rights defenders are actively involved in this issue. The question of the legitimacy of the Tag Suggestions regarding users from Germany was first raised by the information protection agency from Hamburg. This organization has filed a complaint with the German authorities.

    Government authorities agreed that the service violates privacy laws relevant to Germany and the European Union. Now Tag Suggestions is even called the “world's largest biometric database.” The German government sent an official request to the Facebook administration, demanding either to rework the service in such a way that it complies with the laws of Germany and the European Union (it is still unclear how the service should be reworked), or to turn off the face recognition system altogether. In addition, previously collected information must be deleted.

    In total, the company is given two weeks to fulfill the requirements of the German authorities. If nothing is done, a formal trial will begin. Facebook has already made an official comment, claiming that Tag Suggestions comply with German and EU law.

    Officials, in turn, expressed bewilderment by the fact that the Tag Suggestions function is enabled by default, which means that even those photos that are marked as “closed” are automatically recognized. As a result, all such information becomes available to everyone, plus everything, data on millions of users is collected on Facebook servers, and this data is very easy to use to identify almost any user in a photo if previously photos with this person were processed by the service.

    Separately, it is worth noting the fact that the biggest nuisance for Facebook in this case is a fine of 300 thousand euros. In general, this penalty is unlikely to significantly affect the budget of the company, whose cost is estimated at $ 50 billion.

    Via mashable

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