Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
That shit is orwellian in how scary it is. You there, in 12b. Do more push-ups. Your facebook photos are getting fatter.
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.
...you could just turn that feature off.
Just for starters: No court has ruled yet.
There has been an opinion from the germanys chief privacy officer, but this is not a court ruling or something else the police could enforce. Though he is likely to be right (in terms of european and german law), this FB face recognition is not officialy illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Personally I'd like to know what the "post war privacy abuses" that TFA is speaking of that turned Germany so pro privacy.
How quickly we forget that before 1990 what we now know as "Germany" included *EAST* Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
The East German Stasi had a network where neighbours ratted each other out, had huge databases listing all kinds of data of their citizens... On and on. As a consequence, much of Germany now has a huge pro-privacy culture, and a sense that citizens must 'never again' be tracked.
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.
Facebook is a data-mining and advertising company. They can and will sell all that information any time they feel like it.
Why are you intentionally being obtuse? This is about automated, mass identification for profit without a clear way to disable it, opt-out, or delete the data, nor do people really know who ends up with this information and what those buyers can do with it. You could say that's a problem with every single aspect of Facebook. However, people choose to put that info up (perhaps uninformed and without legal understanding of the terms of service but I digress) whereas this is automatic.
Anyway, I look forward to see you in police GPS tracking stories to say you can walk behind people and gun control threads where you say you can kill a person with a rock.
Amazing cars, unbelievable roads (with no speed limits in some cases!), good beer, good food, cool people, and a government that fights for its peoples privacy? When did moving to Germany become attractive? How did we in the US reverse our roles with the krauts?
Deutschland über alles i'm afraid
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!
Not sure who the "we" is in the summary, but I don't know anyone who thinks the facial recognition feature is anything other than creepy.
Read Pynchon.
This is about automated, mass identification for profit without a clear way to disable it, opt-out, or delete the data, nor do people really know who ends up with this information and what those buyers can do with it.
Account menu -> Privacy Settings -> Customize -> "Suggest photos of me to friends" Settings -> Disabled
Seems pretty clear to me, as it is a logical progression through the menus and pages. It's not hard to find. It is easy to disable. It's probably already disabled for many people.
And, at least on my account, it was disabled by default. i.e. As soon as I heard about this feature, I went immediately to my account privacy settings to turn it off and found that it was already turned off.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
If facebook should be outlawed for having software that does that, then by extension, it should be illegal for humans to do the same thing.
By that logic, because the military is allow to possess nuclear weapons, so should you be.
Of course, the circumstances are far different in each case, just as they are with Facebook. I'm not totally on Germany's side here... privacy nowadays is a really thorny issue.
Take GPS tracking. Should cops be allowed to stick a GPS tracker on your car just for the heck of it? Imagine if they did that to everyone in town. (And were really good about it and no one noticed.) They let people drive for a few months, then sent out a few hundred thousand dollars of tickets to everyone. Privacy violation? Should it be legal?
They weren't really doing much that the police couldn't do without GPS. You could have cops tail each person and record all their moves. Have a few of them so that they can switch off so that the person being followed doesn't know it.
Of course, you couldn't actually do that: there are too many practical problems. You'd need an order of magnitude more cops than subjects. Think the people in town wouldn't notice an influx of new people? You'd need the cops to be highly trained and diligent. And who would pay?
(Just like how you could hire an army to go through and manually tag all your photos, but you can't practically speaking.)
But in the end, a GPS device is just emulating a few cops who are good at tailing someone. The latter is legal without a warrant, so why shouldn't the former be?
What it boils down to is that how easy it is to do something matters. It matters a lot. And I think it's certainly reasonable -- perhaps necessary -- to put some legal checks on some of this "privacy busting" technology. Where that line should go... I have no idea.
I recognize the right of others to not recognize without consent.
From the original source (http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20110803-36703.html):
"Johannes Caspar, Hamburg’s data protection official, on Tuesday said the feature was a serious violation of people’s rights to determine what is done with their personal data. He added that German authorities would take quick legal action if Facebook did not comply with his demands.
This could include fines of up to €300,000 ($426,000), Caspar said.
“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,” he said."
At the moment this is just an opinion of the appointed guy for data protection of the city state of Hamburg. Not even a minister/secretary. Although he certainly has a point and Facebook could be fined, Germany is not Iran. We don't just "ban" stuff.
The problem is not the facial recognition itself, it's the tagging and linking of faces you recognized with the faces and profiles of others, that's done a) automatically and b) without you being able to opt out.
So from a privacy law point of view it's totally ok to tag all your Picasa pictures with the names of the people - as long as you don't share this information with anyone else. And that's the problem with Facebook's way of doing things.
Because your profile picture can not be opted out of the face recognition in Facebook, it's still possible to link pictures others share, and where they tag you, to your profile. And that's the privacy violation Germany is complaining about.
In theory that's the way it should be. However, this is Germany. Somebody just has to vaguely imply "anti-semitism" to win an argument. We have very influential Jewish organisations that don't get tired to remember us of WW2 and cry anti-semitism as soon as somebody criticises Israel or somebody who is Jewish.
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.
You have the right not to introduce yourself, resulting in a situation where people may recognize your face, but do not know your name.
Facebook's face recognition removes that right, and even removes the burden that someone has to ask someone else about your name.
-- You have nothing to hide? Don't come crying to me when all your personal data is available on the internet for everyone to see.
Sadly, that's not limited to Germany. Criticism of Israel is prone to cries of anti-semitism. Especially ludicrous when directed at people like me, who are sufficiently jewish to have ended up in the death camps and have relatives names up on the wall of remembrance in the holocaust museum.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
An awful lot of people the world over, especially in the US, do not fetishize anonymity to anywhere near the extent that you do.
The article was about Germany. Some parts of Germany have seen what large scale intrusion is like and are keen to avoid the same folly twice.
Privacy, more often than not, really is a shield for misconduct.
That is unmitigated bullshit, you're just rolling out the old "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" line.
Privacy, more often than not, really is a shield for misconduct. Is it your right to be unseen at a bar when you're cheating on your wife, or kissing another man, or doing whatever it is you're so ashamed of your friends and family finding out about?
Or perhaps you're bi and in an open relationship and you don't feel like haveing to deal with a bunch of crap from your puritanical family or aquaintainces.
Well, clearly not
Wtf? So your argument is that something is a right until you can no longer do it?
These are cultural conventions, remember, ones that other, newer values are displacing.
No, up til now, privacy has been a cultral convention. A technological one is changing things but it means the two are now clashing. Because some cultures apparantly don't believe that "some random person could see you" is equivalent to "a massive organisation is trying to track your every move".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Are you arguing that computers should have the same rights as people?
Wow. I don't know if that's supposed to be anti-Semitic or some kind of joke about Germany passing this law (I'm Irish-American).
It's not. It's a joke about Google's previous CEO, who has also declared privacy dead.
I don't defend our government much, in fact I think it's the current one is the worst this country has ever had (i.e. since WW2).
So it's no surprise that I don't have to. The real truth is that the stupid government hasn't done anything. Including here.
What has happened is that one of the privacy watchdogs (yes, we actually pay people to watch out for privacy invasions. Guess who they call out regularily? Yes, that's right, the government!) has raised the issue formally, declaring that in his opinion the facial recognition and some other features violate existing laws.
That's got nothing to do with the government. In fact, if they had their way, we wouldn't be having this much privacy anymore, they've been undermining it for years.
What it will go to if Facebook doesn't cave in is the courts.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
Race card? I was always under the impression that being Jewish was a religion, not a "race".
Then you were mistaken. It's both.
There are Jews from so many different ethnicities that it's an absolute nonsense to talk about a Jewish race. In the same way that Muslims, Catholics or Buddhists aren't a race.
Wait, so people you used to know (maybe from school or something) have to ask your permission to recognize you if they should bump into you at the mall?
Hey, I've gone to great lengths not to be recognized by people I knew when I was in high school. I've put on about 75 lbs, lost all my hair (except for my goatee, which is very grey), moved all the way across the country, walk with a discernible limb and I've completely lost my youthful, carefree attitude, sense of adventure, 'to each his own' philosophy and sense of humor. In fact the only thing about me that hasn't changed is my taste in music and addiction to enchiladas. I'm pretty sure they'll need more than my permission to recognize me.
Facebook should "auto-tag" photos, but only to let the people in the photos that a photo of them has appeared on the site. Then: 1) Pictures with recognizable people should be quarantined 2) All persons on facebook must consent to having the image of them on facebook. 3) If there isn't already the possibility... any tagged person should have the right to prevent certain groups (colleague, parents, children) from seeing the image. 4) facebook should implement a blur function... so that one can "remove" oneself from the photo, and then give permission. 5) any face in the image, who isn't a facebook user (yes those do exist)... should also be blurred out. Also any one who tags a photo as having you in it when you are not...... should be "tag banned" for life !!! Simple :)
> An awful lot of people the world over, especially in the US, do not
> fetishize anonymity to anywhere near the extent that you do.
Perhaps you could expand a little on why you chose the word 'fetishize' in that sentence instead of, say, 'value'.
sPh