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Hamburg To Fine Facebook Over Facial Recognition Feature
An anonymous reader writes "Johannes Caspar, data protection commissioner for the German state of Hamburg, today declared he will soon fine Facebook over its use of biometric facial recognition technology. He said 'further negotiations are pointless' because the company had ignored a deadline he set for it to remove the feature. German authorities could fine Facebook up to €300,000 ($420,000)."
Germany actually has industry. It's like how if a homeless bum owes $1000, he's never going to pay it, whereas an upper-middle-class guy with a job can owe $300,000 on a mortgage and another $20,000 on a car and still have a future ahead of him.
They would if it was PER OFFENSE.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So what will you whine about when Canada does the same thing? The privacy commissioner launched a similar investigation into this as well, though our fine could be in the several million dollar range.
Om, nomnomnom...
Silly goose, only the government can use facial recognition!
That works fine until this upper-middle-class guy's job is shipped over to some third-world shithole nation where the work is performed at a small fraction of the cost by somebody with an even smaller fraction of the skill doing a very horrible job at it. Now the upper-middle-class guy is $300,000 in debt and jobless. Since he was a manager for a few years, he no longer has any technical skills, and there are no management jobs available, so he's shit out of luck. Even if he took that job at Burger King, it'd still take him over 20 years to pay down that debt, and that's without spending money on anything else, and without taking into account the interest! Furthermore, thanks to "Free Trade" and their outsourcing blunder, the company he used to work for will go under in a few months, so he has no chance of ever going back there. He can't even start up his own business, because nobody is willing to lend him any more money given his current $300,000 debt load. Even though he's making absolutely no income, and the interest on his debt grows daily, he still needs to provide food and shelter for his family. He can't sell his house, because nobody else is financially sound enough to purchase it. Even worse, he can't sell his car because he lives in the suburbs where there is absolutely no public transit and the only way to get the basic necessities of life is to drive 20 km into the city. Welcome to America, circa 2011.
The office that threatens to sue is not that of a politician but that of the data protection officer of the State (not city!) of Hamburg. This is not about politicians playing web sheriffs, this is about upholding the law. Some of our data protection laws are slightly overreaching and collide with practical IT needs - server operators who fall under German jurisdiction may not even store IP adresses of visitors, so the stock Apache logging settings violate our laws - but overall our personally identifiable information enjoys strong protection. Several state DPO's are taking initiative against things like Facebook's Like button being embedded into websites, and I clearly see this as a good thing.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
This is why you rent a house, lease a car, and learn chinese. $300 on rosetta-stone and you can live like a king as a cab driver in shanghai!
Yes, I'm going to riot in the streets because some company based in another country has decided to stop doing business with people in my country.
"what do we want", "Legal immunity for overseas corporations" "when do we want it" "NOW!"
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Mod parent up! You're absolutely right. Facebook is an American-based company, and German citizens have to voluntarily visit facebook.com, taking them to the American site, then set up an account, and then supply them with information. That American company shouldn't then be hauled into a German court and ordered to restructure it's website to meet German standards. China doesn't like Facebook's model, so they block the website; they don't try to dictate how Facebook should run its business.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
You have it backwards. If German users want to use a US service, they can deal with how the service works as constituted in its home country. If the Germans don't want to use some service, they always have that option. This is legal fuckery, no more. Typical mommy government idiocy.
I'm no fan of Facebook -- quite the opposite, in fact, I outright despise them -- but again, my answer is not to use Facebook, not to try to tell them what they can or cannot do.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.