Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Germany Says Facebook's Facial Recognition Is Illegal

Posted by samzenpus on from the pictures-of-you dept.

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.'"

23 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. GO GERMANS by tenshihan · · Score: 5, Funny

    That shit is orwellian in how scary it is. You there, in 12b. Do more push-ups. Your facebook photos are getting fatter.

    1. Re:GO GERMANS by bonch · · Score: 3, Informative

      It should be noted that German investigators were also the ones who caused Google to admit their four years of Street View data-snooping.

    2. Re:GO GERMANS by drolli · · Score: 5, Informative

      It should be noted how that works. In Germany every institution which processes personal data has to have a "Datenschutzbeauftragter" (Personal privacy protection responsible), ans this since the early 90s (as far as i remember). And there are one of these for each of the Countries in Germany.

      As fas as i understand the west German strong movement and awareness for the issue arose in 1987 census, which caused a lot of work for the courts and polarized the population against government data collection. Before that the "Rasterfahndung" (a sieving of registration office and other data to find terrorism suspects) in the 1970s deepened the split between the different political views in Germany (IMHO prolonging the support for the terroristic "red army fraction" in the population). About former East Germany it can only be said that people who were spied upon all the time and having disadvantaged in life if saying privately the wrong thing may not feel very well about being tracked.

      Last but not least one of the first large-scale usage of automated population databases (on Hollerith puchcards) in Germany was the organization of the Holocaust.

      All these are good reasons that Germany should be extra-careful about data collections. And germans should be, too, but every time i stand in the shop at the cashier is am asked if i use a customer point card (which then would probably allow the company behind to correlate my buying of underwear with the books i buy).

      I for my part can only say that i am lucky that i forbid even friends to put photos of me to an uncontrolled space in the Internet. There is only a

    3. Re:GO GERMANS by kuiperbelt · · Score: 4, Informative

      Countries in Germany, eh? Which ones would those be exactly?

      Parent almost certainly means the states of the federal republic (Länder). The word "Land" in German can translate as "country" or "state".

    4. Re:GO GERMANS by drolli · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well the problem is simple. If facebook offers such a service then it falls under the laws existing in Germany. If they offer the service to identify me personally against their database on photos which other people upload then they need my permission to do so.

      The problem is that as long as facebook does not require any valid identification to get an account there, there is no way that would prevent the following: somebody uploads a photo of mine as his account photo and then asks facebook to look for him (that is, me) and then he or she can easily find out what i am doing even if i never touched anything there or my name is not mentioned. Very practical if you are an employer (applications in Germany still contain your photo).....

    5. Re:GO GERMANS by headLITE · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:GO GERMANS by moonbender · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
  2. My right of notbeingrecognized is being recognized by kasnol · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Finally someone recognizes the right of "not being recognized without consent".

  3. Just the facial recognition component? by wickerprints · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Just the facial recognition component? by HellYeahAutomaton · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If they snapped a photo of you while you were walking down the street, deal with it because that is a public space and anyone could have done that.

      The problem here is how people will deal with it:
      a) The native American who doesn't want their soul stolen.
      b) The wanna-be fashion diva who claims you didn't get their release, and you are stealing their IP, livelihood, etc.
      c) Or the guy who just wants to kick your ass because he doesn't want photos around that he didn't consent.

      People in general have a reasonable expectation of privacy everywhere they go despite what all of the social media douchebags think. When you click that photo, you best be sure you know how to defend yourself, because you do not know how people are going to react.

    2. Re:Just the facial recognition component? by Kagetsuki · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Ditto. And I get constant e-mails from Facebook because my friends decided to import their address books and now Facebook knows me. What's amazing is that my dead uncle who I only met once in person while living, his account still exists and Facebook keeps telling me he "wants to reconnect" with me. Yeah, I'm never signing up.

    3. Re:Just the facial recognition component? by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Get a clue. It isn't as much the presence of the photos on FB that Grandparent is objecting to. It's the tagging of the photo by friends.

      Sure, any photo taken in public is 'public knowledge.' But photos taken in public by strangers aren't captioned. And it isn't being 'fanatical about privacy' to not want captioned photos of yourself out there beyond your control. That's the entire fricking point about the Facial Recognition deal. It renders the captions world-searchable to a degree that was unthinkable a decade ago. And it makes rather aggressive data mining cheap.

    4. Re:Just the facial recognition component? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If they snagged a photo of you, they probably did so because you interacted with them. At that point, what you do is public knowledge.

      Our law disagrees. Actually, even taking a picture of someone (safe celebrities known to the law as "people of public interest") is not permitted without his or her explicit consent. Publishing this picture in whatever way requires consent again, and permitting the former does not imply permitting the latter in the slightest.

      It's quite similar in Germany, btw.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    5. Re:Just the facial recognition component? by Pieroxy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are missing the point by about a hundred thousand miles. What happens in real life cannot be cross connected and searched on in a fraction of a second. What computers brought to the picture is this ability. Cross the social security database with Facebook and Google databases and you've got a tool that is all dictators wet dreams.

      Of course, nothing more than being recognized in the street. Except it is a lot more.

      In France, we have a state-backed organism that basically prevents any private database from using a key from another database. It also forces companies to delete or update your account if you wish (it's the law that YOU have control over YOUR data even if it's in some companies database.)

      It's a bit harder to build databases. Sure, using the SSN to identify everyone resolves a lot os issues, but that's strictly forbidden. As a result, identity theft is a concept that doesn't exist in France.

      The fact that anyone can recognize you in the street is *not* equivalent to random people tagging you on Facebook.

      --
      Write boring code, not shiny code!
    6. Re:Just the facial recognition component? by adri · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's not just the "likeness", it also includes:

      * what you were wearing;
      * where you were;
      * what your current physiological state is (drunk, high, etc);
      * who you were with
      * what your current mental state is (happy, sad, etc);

      All of this and more can be gleaned from these photos.

      You may not object to this, but then people can start using this to tie together where people were at certain times. For example, you could have your photo from a party added to a database of other people at the same party, tied together not only by the photo album, but the photo date/time, the photo GPS location, shared information about where other people in the photo were, information gleaned from the background of the photo.. soon you're tracking where people are, what people are doing and who they associate with, all from a set of loosely-tied together photos tagged with face identification.

      It's going on now. It's not affecting you, because you're likely a white dude in the united states. When its being publicly used by governments wishing to oppress people - then you may stand up and pay attention. When people start uploading photoshopped versions of photos to "establish" someone was at a certain location, thus tainting them in a way that gets said oppressive government to nab them .. who's to say this hasn't yet happened?

  4. Re:And yet by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:the end of privacy? by hjf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Stop confusing anonymity with privacy.

  6. Re:My right of notbeingrecognized is being recogni by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  7. Totally wrong. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Facebook is a data-mining and advertising company. They can and will sell all that information any time they feel like it.

  8. I'm in the wrong country... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  9. Not "banned". by Udo+Schmitz · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:My right of notbeingrecognized is being recogni by sg_oneill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  11. Re:My right of notbeingrecognized is being recogni by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.