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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.
Facebook's even going to notice that?
Ok, using that line of reasoning, I'm going to fine Facebook for $400,000. Hand it over Zuckerberg, it's a bargain.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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!
If they want to do business only in America, then they can ignore the laws of the rest of the world.
Are they doing business in Germany?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
Facebook.de / German-language facebook / office in the city of.. Hamburg, Germany.
( http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=hamburg )
So... Yes.
This happens a lot... and it can get into major overhead. The place I used to work had to go through special hoops to get a workplace training system with questions and answers approved by the German Works Council because we collected a worker ID and could track what answers they selected for questions. We were using it to track what questions were missed the most, but being able to find out what employee answered incorrectly was a concern.
There was also a situation in dealing with Quebec and ensuring that French was listed before English because they have some law that felt it important to violate the alphabetical sorting of language text.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
More to the point who is going enforce the German law?
As I posted elsewhere, the court can order German ISPs to block facebook.
a physical office is doing business you blithering idiot.
Hamburg, Germany
Our German office is located in beautiful downtown Hamburg, surrounded by splendid shopping opportunities we are also just few minutes walk from the vibrant harbor area and the most infamous part of town - St. Pauli!
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Account Management (1)
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Head of Brand & Agency Marketing (Hamburg)
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Senior Strategist, Global Customer Marketing (Hamburg)
Sales International (3)
Client Partner (Hamburg)
International Client Partner (Hamburg)
Regional Director Europe (Germany & Nordics)
This isn't all of Germany. This is a city-state. This is more similar to the whole Amazon sales tax issue here in the USA. Jus't because your people access/buy/sale things on a site; does not mean that you have the right to control that site. I'm anti-corporation all the way, I'm just also anti-government totalitarianism too.
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!
They've already tried that two or three times and failed miserably at it.
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
well obviously they do.
unless someone got really high and started throwing darts a map then opened up offices wherever the darts landed. then forgot all about it.
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?
Presumably you are not from Germany. Privacy and data protection are regarded quite differently over here compared to, say the US. We had two totalitarian regimes in one century on German soil who drew most of their power from the insane amount of information they collected on individual citizens, and the last few months of public debate have been dominated by several data snooping and retention initiatives by our government and police, and this debate may well cost a few top-ranking politicians and public servants their seats/jobs.
People here regard information about themselves as their property. When Google announced the expansion of StreetView to Germany they brought a shitstorm upon themselves. Take a look around German cities in StreetView. A large number of houses had to be blurred out because of complaints by residents. Google very narrowly avoided concerted legal action from our federal and states' data protection officers. Facebook will have to follow the law or risk being banned. We had quite a few successful social networks here before Facebook opened up to international users. Right now they are barely keeping themselves afloat, but should Facebook be kicked out they would jump to fill the void with a legal alternative.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
If they want to do business in Germany, they comply with German law. Not sure what's so difficult to understand on that point... wouldn't be the first time Facebook has had to adjust its practices to stay on the friendly side of the law. Actually, it wouldn't be the first time they've had to adjust their practices to comply with German law, at that. The reason you can hide your profile from search, among other privacy features you've been granted, are because of the orders of the German and Canadian privacy commissions....
Facebook have an office in Hamburg.
Yes, certainly. Facebook could pull their physical presence from Hamburg (though that would include any servers etc.), so long as other German states or the Federal Government don't decide to do the same. And if they do Facebook can simply pull their physical presence from Germany entirely and be fine. For whatever reason, Facebook have chosen to have a physical office in Hamburg, so I imagine they won't be too keen doing that (especially not for the measly sum of $400k), but it would be a clean solution...
What you say would be true if FB didn't actually do business in Germany. The thing is, they do. They have offices in Hamburg, and they also do business with German advertisers, selling the information of German citizens. If they want to continue doing business in Germany, then they comply with German laws. Be grateful. This wouldn't be the first time some American company with no concept of consumer rights has tried to fuck over its customers, only to be thwarted by the laws of a country where they do business, and it certainly won't be the last. Perhaps you should be bitching about the state of privacy laws and individual rights in the US rather than about a sovereign nation enforcing its laws on companies seeking to do business in their jurisdiction.
If they were strictly a US site that happened to be accessible from Germany (like, for example, Slashdot), then perhaps what you say would have merit. The thing is, they aren't, and it doesn't. This isn't really any different from the US enforcing its laws on foreign companies... case in point, Bell Canada has to comply with SarbOx rules, because some of their stock gets traded through the NYSE. This is a company that doesn't have any customers outside of Canada, that doesn't offer service outside of Canada (doesn't even offer service to all of Canada), that doesn't buy services from providers outside of Canada, and that is majority owned by Canadians. By all judgements, they have even less to do with the US than Facebook has to do with Germany, but because they trade on the NYSE, they have to comply with US trade rules, and the only way to not comply with rules like SarbOx would be to de-list from the NYSE. And yet nobody in the US is bitching about that, or the thousands of other examples of foreign companies that have to comply with US laws to do business in the states. Hypocrisy much?
No, you're the one that has it backwards.
For one Facebook is not just a US service.
They have an office in Hamburg.
They have www.facebook.de registered. this is a German owned TLD.
They have 21,880,080 German Users
If i were to start selling greeting cards full of anthrax which i shipped to your country, would you just decide that people in your country should not use my greeting card service?
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
If you run a site that is accessible internationally, how can you ensure that you're always abiding by all nations laws? At what point can a country up and decide you're breaking one of their laws and they can start fining you?
Need any dad jokes?
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.
Or they can, y'know, go to facebook.de, the version that comes up on your screen auf Deutsch ;-)
Actually, when I tried that URL in a firefox window, it bounced me to de-de.facebook.com, and nothing I tried could convince it otherwise. So I fired up one of the other dozen browsers that I have on this Mac, gave it facebook.de, and it's now showing the registration page - in German. It's also telling me "JavaScript ist in deinem Browser deaktiviert", which is correct for that browser.
So you were mostly wrong. Anyone want to test whether Germans using firefox will be redirected to that bizarre de-de.facebook.com site that's in English? I suppose I could indirect through a German anonymizer, but that seems rather a lot of work for just a /. discussion. And it might be doing that in my FF window because I am in fact logged into facebook via FF.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
No, this is not a local issue, the reason Hamburg is doing this is because the headquarters of Facebook Germany are in Hamburg, so the Hamburg Data Protection Officer is the one that has to deal with a company that is breaking the law, if a German company based in NY breaks the law it is the duty of the NY Procecution office to deal with it, not the duty of congress is it ?
Facebook has fewer guns than the Nazis did - and the Nazis may have been enabled by information but they executed their plans by force, which is what one of the parties here (not Facebook) is doing.
But, anyway, I were Facebook, my response would be to disable the accounts of the Hamburg users and apologize for not having the desire to customize the platform to every locality's unique laws. Facebook could potentially be up against tens of thousands of micro-customizations here which would be hell to QA.
Let the people sort out with their government how important this sort of prosecution is to them, and let the local networks take back their old job.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That's a mistake that can be easily rectified.
"Whoops i accidentally opened an office in Hamburg, registered a German TLD and started doing business overseas " yes i can see the mistake now.
Facebook can, and hopefully will, remove their sub-agency from your country.
yes we are in agreeance. they can stop doing business in Germany if they wish to not comply with German laws. we are also in agreeance that it would be a good thing if they did stop doing business in Germany.
It isn't relevant to the issue at hand, which is FB is an American operation, not a German one.
How is the fact that they do business in Germany not-relevant to the fact that they do not wish to comply with German laws???
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
In comparison it does not seem to matter: Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity - according to the first diagram the productivity in the US and Germany is quite comparable despite the much stricter data protection laws.
These privacy laws define constitutional rights in Germany, so the interests of the corporations to maximize profit are lower ranked (as they are not on constitutional level).
Lol yeah Greek debt is the problem when Germany has more than three times the debt of Greece.
I think that's a bit like saying to your bank manager "why worry about my $5,000 loan when Bill gates has loans many times that size.
"the German state of Hamburg"
Actually Hamburg is a so-called "free city" inside Germany (i.e., is not part of any state / land) due to its history as a free city since 1189. While technically it is a self-governing entity at the level of state, its name and real status is that of a "free and Hanseatic city".
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
I have friends who have exactly this plan in mind. One is currently a secondary level science teacher, the other an Eastern Bloc / Asia specialist for a high-class tourism company. They plan on moving to China to teach English. You get paid UK-level wages, but pay China prices for everything. You're effectively a local millionaire.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I have friends who have exactly this plan in mind. One is currently a secondary level science teacher, the other an Eastern Bloc / Asia specialist for a high-class tourism company. They plan on moving to China to teach English. You get paid UK-level wages, but pay China prices for everything. You're effectively a local millionaire.
The downside being that you have to live in China.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it