The German government is unhappy with the facial recognition service Tag Suggestions from Facebook

Most recently, the social network Facebook launched a face recognition system in photos, which was 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 irreplaceable. But German officials responsible for respecting the rights and freedoms of their citizens believe that Tag Suggestions violates both German and pan-European laws regarding privacy.



In principle, the function Tag Suggestions can be turned off by any user in the security settings, but the Germans want this feature not to be used at all when it comes to German citizens. In addition, European human rights defenders are now actively involved in this issue. The question of the legality of the work of Tag Suggestions regarding users from Germany was first raised by the information protection agency from Hamburg. This organization appealed to the official bodies of Germany with a complaint.

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Government authorities agreed that the said service violates privacy laws that are 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 redesign the service so that it complies with the laws of Germany and the European Union (how exactly the service needs to be reworked is still unclear), or to disable the facial recognition system altogether. In addition, the previously collected information must necessarily be deleted.



The whole company is given two weeks to fulfill the requirements of the official bodies of Germany. If nothing is done, a formal trial will begin. The administration of Facebook has already given an official comment, claiming that Tag Suggestions complies with the laws of Germany and the European Union.



The officials, in turn, expressed bewilderment by the fact that the Tag Suggestions feature is turned on 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, Facebook servers collect data on millions of users, and this data is very easy to use to identify almost any user in the photo, if previously photos with this person were processed by the service.



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



Via mashable