Facebook Forced to Kill Facial Recognition in Europe, Still Hopes to Bring It Back

It seems that Facebook has caved to pressure from EU data privacy officials and is now disabling the photo recognition feature on the continent. The feature made it easy for people to tag their friends in photos as Facebook uses facial recognition to automatically label them.

But this feature was deemed an invasion of privacy, somehow, and was the cause of long investigation in Europe. The Irish data protection commissioner has now concluded its report of the investigation and is happy to announce that Facebook is giving up on the feature, for now.

Facebook will be deleting all of the data it has collected until now and won't be collecting any more data. It's also removing the option from the settings panel.

However, Facebook is not giving up on it entirely, it could re-enable the feature once it figures out a way of notifying users before enabling it for them.