Germany Probes Facebook Facial Recognition

Making facial-recognition research opt-out might run afoul of European and German data protection laws, John Caspar, Hamburg's commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, said in a Tuesday letter to Facebook.

Caspar likened the facial-recognition software to the collection of biometric data. He said Facebook is likely sitting atop the world's largest database of biometric information given that users have uploaded an estimated 75 billion photos to the social-networking site and tagged 450 million people.

Back in December, Facebook announced plans for facial-recognition research intended to make it easier for people to tag photos of friends. Facebook said it would examine newly uploaded photos and compare them to other photos in which you or your friends are tagged in order to make tagging suggestions. Recently, nevertheless, security firm Sophos expressed concern that facial recognition had been turned on by default, prompting inquiries from regulators.

Though the Article 29 Working Party is independent of the European Commission, the commission will propose a reform of the data protection rules this year. "The challenges on data protection resulting from new technologies, just as cloud computing and social network sites, are one of the central reasons for this reform," the spokesman said recently.

Caspar, in the meantime, is no stranger to going afterwards top U.S. tech firms. Last year, his office launched an investigation into how Facebook handles the personal information of people who are not a part of the social networking site. He as well spearheaded last year's effort to allows Germans to opt-out of having their homes appear on Google's Street View.