14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is no stranger to controversy issues. One of the latest has been around its facial recognition feature, which it rolled out in Europe in the last few months. The feature caused a lot of outcry, even though it's not really a privacy violation.
Germany's privacy regulator begs to differ though, the lead Hamburg office is making rounds in the press again by saying that Facebook's facial recognition feature is a privacy violation and is asking the site to disable it in the country or face a fine.
"Should Facebook maintain the function, it must ensure that only data from persons who have declared consent to the storage of their biometric facial profiles be stored in the database," Johannes Caspar, Hamburg's data protection official, said.
Unlike most initial concerns, Germany doesn't really have a problem with how the feature works, rather with the fact that Facebook stores this data on all of its users by default, without consent.
Even though only friends can use the data, indirectly, to discover users in photos, making it easier to tag them, the fact that it exists at all is a risk, the data protection officials believe.
"If the user’s data falls into the wrong hands, it would be possible to compare and identify anybody capture in a photo taken with a mobile phone," the official said.
Of course, anyone that has actually used facial recognition features, from Facebook or anyone else, knows that this is hardly true, the algorithms have problems even with similar looking photos.
Identifying someone from a phone pic alone, even if you had access to all of Facebook's database would be close to impossible, the error rates are too high.
"This is what’s most problematic. The programme feeds off a stock of data designed to physically identify millions of users," the authorities believe.
So Facebook has to delete the data for anyone in Germany and then ask them for consent in building up a profile. Facebook believes its practices fall directly under European privacy laws, but has said it is looking into the issue to see how it can come to terms with German officials.