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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)."
Silly goose, only the government can use facial recognition!
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?