Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Germany: Facebook must destroy facial recognition database

by Jon Brodki

German data protection officials today accused Facebook of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent” and demanded that the social network destroy its archive of files based on facial recognition technology, the New York Times reported. Facebook says that it uses face recognition software to match users’ photos to others and suggest friends to tag in those photos.

A user can prevent friends from seeing tag suggestions when they upload photos that look like that user. But this requires opting out through Facebook privacy settings, which Germany notes is a violation of European law.


Full article here...

While i understand that this is not related to teaching, time after time, one reads warnings about privacy erosion in this day and age. In reality, online privacy doesn't exist, and anything uploaded to these social media sites belongs to them. In other words, any information that you have on these social networking sites is a product that you provide to these companies. The terms of service clearly state that your data is theirs to use, for whatever reason they and their corresponding governments see fit.

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