Berlin — As the humongous crowd flocks by the biggest social outfit around the globe, that is Facebook, but the social media giants recently re-activated facial-recognition application violates European and German data protection law and the social network must stop the program and delete all data already collected on users — or face fines up to €300,000, says official.
The head of Hamburg’s German data protection authority has consulted Facebook and asked it to disable its facial recognition feature over German users amidst concerns that it violates European Union privacy laws.
Johannes Caspar, head of the Hamburg Data Protection Authority, mailed Facebook a letter, in which he indicated that the company’s facial recognition application amounts to unauthorized data collection on individuals. Caspar sent the letter on Wednesday, and has given Facebook two weeks to respond. However, Caspar stated that the German authorities would take action if Facebook did not comply and could face fines of up to €300,000 (£262,000).
An estimated 75bn photos have been uploaded to Facebook since it was set up by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Photograph: Mike Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis
“Should Facebook plans to continue the function, it must ensure that only data from persons who have granted their approval to the storage of their biometric facial profiles be stored in the database,” he said. The software offered potential for “considerable abuse” and was illegal.
“If the users’ data lands into the wrong hands, it would be possible to compare and identify anybody captured in a photo taken with a mobile phone,” Caspar told the Hamburger Abenblatt newspaper.
Apparently, the application determine faces on uploaded photos according to physical features and saves them, creating what may be “the world’s largest database of biometric features,” Hamburg’s agency for data protection and information security said in a statement on its website yesterday.
The program attempts to compare data captured in a picture with the trove of data it has already collected from its hundreds of millions of users. There was an uproar when it was rolled out in June to more than 500 million members worldwide, though users can opt out of the automatic tagging, Facebook can still gather and store (indefinitely) all photos added to the site.
“This is what is most troublesome. The program feeds off a stock of data designed to physically identify millions of users,” he said.
However, this is far from the first time that social media Facebook’s facial recognition feature has been condemned–the feature was introduced in December, and it has been constantly attacked since.
“The legal situation is clear in my opinion,” Caspar told Wednesday’s Hamburger Abendblatt. Such a system could be exploited by undemocratic governments to spy on the opposition or by security services around the world. “The right to anonymity is in danger,” he said.
Caspar is backed by the federal consumer protection ministry. “We expect Facebook to comply with all European and German data protection standards and for it to respond to the request from the Hamburg regional data protection officer,” said a spokeswoman.
Though, Facebook has smartly safeguarded itself by denying that it is doing anything wrong–though the company did say it would take Caspar’s concerns into consideration. “We will consider the points the Hamburg Data Protection Authority have made about the ‘photo tag suggest’ feature, but “firmly rejected any accusations that we are not complying with our obligations to European Union data protection laws”.
This is not the first time any multinational technology firms have hit snags in Germany, which takes online privacy much more seriously than many other countries. Earlier, Germany has criticized Google for its “Street View” program, which makes street-level images freely available online. Germany’s privacy laws generally restrict photographs of people and property except in public places, such as a sporting event, without a person’s consent.
Facebook claims to have more than 750 million members.