Facebook's facial recognition system is illegal

[danrok]

See front page:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/t...-illegal-.html

Comments?

[Gizmo]

Can someone explain this to me? I'm not really seeing what the row is about?

[danrok]

I think that Facebook is gethering personal data, i.e. some form of biometric data, without member's permission.

Which is illegal under EU laws, data protection act.

If someone tags your face in several photos, Facebook's software will hunt for faces that match yours in other photos.

[Gizmo]

I'm all for ensuring that my data aren't used without my permission, but it seems to me like this may be erring bit too far on the side of caution.

If I understand you correctly, then what is essentially happening is that FaceBook are being told they can't do this because some bad guy might use it for nefarious purposes.

Thing is, I can see plenty of beneficial uses for this: someone sees a photo of me with some friends on one of my friend's FaceBook pages. That photo's tagged and so that person looks up other photos. Maybe some of those photos aren't tagged, but sure enough, there's my face. And they discover that we have some friends in common, and boom, suddenly we're best buddies.

Yes, a bad guy could take advantage of that. HELLO? That's what bad guys DO! That's WHY they're BAD GUYS! Because they take something conceived for an innocent purpose and turn it to nefarious use. Telling me that I can't take advantage of that tool doesn't do anything to prevent the bad guys from (ab)using said tool: they'll just use something else.

In other words, we've sacrificed freedom to gain security and have failed to gain any security. That's a recipe for totalitarianism, and it is entirely the wrong way to be approaching the problem.

Now, if FaceBook are doing something else and I've completely misunderstood what's going on, then feel free to ignore everything I just typed.

[danrok]

Seems that German privacy laws are tighter than EU and US law, due to past history, i.e. Nazis and the Stasi.