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Germany Says Facebook's Facial Recognition Is Illegal
fysdt writes "Although we think it's generally a pretty nifty feature, valid concerns over the misuse of Facebook's auto-recognition tagging have lead Germany to ban it entirely. That's right — Facebook in its current state is now illegal. The German government, which possesses perhaps the world's most adamant privacy laws as a result of postwar abuse, considers Facebook's facial recognition a violation of 'the right to anonymity.'"
Finally someone recognizes the right of "not being recognized without consent".
The whole damn site is a privacy violation. I don't even use FB and I know that there are photos of me floating around on there, tagged by my so-called "friends." Short of being a hermit, I have no way to stop people from uploading data that identifies me to a site that makes money by exploiting that knowledge to sell shit.
Stop confusing anonymity with privacy.
Anyone playing the race card has lost the argument already before opening his mouth.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Race card? I was always under the impression that being Jewish was a religion, not a "race".
As with most things, it's very easy to make up your mind if you choose to ignore the last hundred years of debate and scholarship on the topic.
Breakfast served all day!
Yeah thats one of the big sticking points of difference between Orthodox and Liberal judaism is that you can convert in liberal judaism fairly easy whereas its an extremely complicated process (possibly not even possible) in orthodox judaism.
Its also been a big bone of contention in israel as to whether recognising converts .... well lets not go there, I detest that a modern western country still hasn't understood that the minute a government takes religion into account for citizenship your living in an undeclared theocracy. Alas.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
yup, this is Germany.
Once you realise the first time there was computerised cataloging of individuals, it was used to divvy them up into those who will be sent to the gas chamber and those who would be good blue-eyed blonds. You can understand why this is a big deal and why the law is set as it is. Even facebook doesn't get an opt-out for this.
English-speaking folks learned of the existence of Bavaria when it was called Bavaria or something phonetically similar. Baden-Württemberg was formed after WWII so it was never called something else. Saxony-Anhalt is an interesting case. Saxony is derived from the old Latin name Saxonia, while Anhalt is not old enough to have a Latin name. When Saxony-Anhalt was created after WWII with the German name Sachsen-Anhalt, English speakers used the existing English name of Saxony but the Anhalt part wasn't translated.
For the same reason, Germans are called Germans in English while modern-day Germans using the same word (Germannen) would be talking about members of the Germanic tribes from two thousand years ago. The German name for modern-day Germans (Deutsche) is only a few hundred years old; at the time people started using it to refer to what ended up to be Germany (Deutschland), English already had a name for the people living in the general direction of where Germany is located.
Your post is full of assertions and half-truths. Of course it's technically possible to collect (face,name) pairs, but whether it's economically viable is hardly clear and is not a fixed proposition. It might be viable one day (because it's legal and/or people want it) and non-viable the other (because it's illegal and/or people don't want it anymore, for whatever reason). You're giving up the fight without a struggle, before it's even really started yet.
And, regardless, not everything that's technically and economically viable gets done, or if done, amounts to anything of importance. Collecting face data was being done before Facebook (or other big names) were doing it, but nobody cared, because it's only a big deal if somebody like Facebook with its insane network effects is backing it.
Calling the exchange of your data for access of other peoples data a fair trade is arbitrary: you can argue that it's the price to pay right now, but there's nothing inherently fair about it. There's nothing inherently fair about paying 1 EUR for organic milk, either, but at least that's a price established in a well-known and relatively transparent process, with non-surprising consequences for both sides.
Oh yeah and then that hogwash on getting rid of privacy for great justice and fighting oppression. I'm sure knowing your peers masturbatory habits will be very useful when someone shoves a gun in your face. Drivel.
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