Facebook's integration of face recognition technology into its photo tagging feature has EU regulators concerned over possible privacy violations. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which advises national data protection agencies, suggests the feature "can bear a lot of risks for users."
"Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people's prior consent and it can't be activated by default," Article 29 member Gerald Lommel told Bloomberg Businessweek. Article 29, along with Ireland's national data protection agency, will examine the new feature to see if it violates any EU regulations.
The new feature, called "Tagging Suggestions," has been in testing for the last several months, but was recently rolled out "in most countries," according to Facebook. When photos are uploaded to Facebook, its servers use face recognition technology to automatically identify faces and suggest possible matches among your friends. The same basic technology is widely used in photo editing software from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others.
The feature is active by default, though users can turn it off if they wish. It does not automatically tag anyone as Lommel suggests, however. Instead, it merely presents a suggested tag based on matches from previously uploaded and tagged photos; users can click an "x" to ignore any tagging suggestions. The feature also won't suggest tags for people you aren't friends with, and it won't suggest your name if someone you're not friends with uploads a picture of you.
Like Facebook's regular tagging feature, though, users can tag images with their friends' names without prior consent. Your friends can remove the tag however, and you can also limit who can see photos you are tagged in via Facebook's privacy settings. Tagging friends in photos has worked this way ever since it was first added to Facebook several years ago, so it seems odd that this new feature should raise any new privacy concerns now.
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