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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)."
They would if it was PER OFFENSE.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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.
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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Regional Director Europe (Germany & Nordics)
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
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....
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?
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