Facebook has disabled face recognition in Europe (for new users)

EU authorities have long been negotiating with Facebook because of numerous violations of the laws on the protection of user data. A year ago, Austrian law student Mark Schrems asked for a CD with information collected on him and found deleted messages, chat sessions, names of former friends and other data marked as deleted: true is a gross violation of European law. The student sent another 22 different requests to Facebook: separately for each item of the site’s dubious functionality that may violate European law. He also organized a public campaign Europe against Facebook . As a result, the student was able to initiate an official audit of the company Facebook by European authorities, which brought some results.



Facebook Audit is handled by Billy Hawkes, the Irish User Data Protection Commissioner, because Facebook’s European representation is registered in Dublin. Six months ago, he sent a number of recommendations to the social network to improve the Facebook rules for protecting user data. And now Facebook has agreed to meet part of the exhibited requirements, including having turned off automatic recognition of friends in photos (Tag Suggest function) for new users from the European Union.



The 74-page Facebook audit report is posted here .



Automatic face recognition is only a small part of the privacy breaches that Facebook has incriminated. Some public organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, consider Facebook’s commercial approach to serving a social network as fundamentally wrong. For example, the legendary founder of the software freedom movement, Richard Stallman, gathered a whole dossier on Facebook , including instances of breaching user privacy, describing unacceptable practices for using Like buttons for mass surveillance, and much more. In one of the discussions, Richard Stallman spoke very categorically : “Facebook is an international parasitic project. There are many ethically acceptable ways to communicate with people. For example, you can use a separate website or a WordPress blog. ”

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Well-known activist Julian Assange called Facebook "the most disgusting spy system created in the history of mankind."



Nevertheless, the Irish Commissioner Billy Hawkes was generally satisfied with the results of the Facebook check .