Facebook face recognition function violates German data protection law

Beijing Time August 3 News, according to foreign http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/31646.html "> media reports, a German local regulator said in Tuesday, Facial recognition on Facebook, the world's largest social networking site, violates European and German data protection laws and requires the company to remove image data obtained from this feature.

In a statement released on its official web site, the Hamburg data protection and information Security Agency, Germany, in Tuesday, said Facebook's software is able to perform facial evaluations of the user photos uploaded to the site based on physical features, and then save the images to create what could be "the world's largest biometric database."

Microsoft and Google, the two other big technology companies in the United States, have consulted users on whether they are opposed to taking photos of their homes and coming online, amid public concerns about privacy of personal data. The regulator said Facebook's facial recognition function should be explicitly communicated to the user and licensed by the user before saving the data.

"Automatic facial recognition is a serious violation of the right to self-determination of individuals in the information age," Johannes Caspar, head of the agency, said in the statement Casper. Even large, multinational companies must respect that. The statement also pointed out that Facebook users have uploaded more than 75 billion photos, the total number of users of the photo label reached 450 million.

A Facebook spokesman who declined to be named quoted the company's internal rules as saying that Facebook was very certain that the feature would not violate European laws, but that it would consider requests from German regulators. The spokesman also noted that Facebook received positive feedback from users about the feature, and that "few users complained about the feature".

(Responsible editor: admin)