Facebook is having a tough time in Norway. Per latest reports, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority is questioning the social networking giant over apprehensions regarding its facial recognition tool that automatically suggests people's names to tag in pictures. Facebook released the Tag Suggestions feature worldwide in June 2011 and since then has faced criticism from privacy groups in Europe.
The Facial Recognition feature comes into action when you upload new photos. Next, Facebook uses software similar to that found in many photo editing tools to match your new photos to other photos you're tagged in. The feature groups similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggests the names of your friends in the photos.
Long story short, the feature not only finds faces in a photo, but also suggests names of your Facebook friends to streamline the tagging process. This feature can be useful when you have the same friends in multiple uploaded shots.
"It's a very powerful tool Facebook has and it's not yet clear how it all really works," Bjorn Erik Thon, Norway's data protection commissioner, told Bloomberg. "They have pictures of hundreds of millions of people. What material Facebook has in its databases is something we need to discuss with them."
Data protection regulators from the 27-nation European Union have been investigating Facebook's Facial Recognition feature. Earlier this year, the EU's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party declared that the feature can only be used with people's consent.
"Users should always be provided with the possibility to withdraw consent in a simple manner," the Article 29 group, which issues guidelines for national regulators, said in their March 22 opinion. "Once consent is withdrawn processing for the purposes of facial recognition should stop immediately."
Facebook, however, has maintained that the tag-suggesting feature is on song with the European Union law and insists that it has properly informed users about the technology, which they can turn off if they so choose.
"We have given comprehensive notice and education to our users about tag suggest, and we provide very simple tools for people to opt out if they do not want to use this feature," a Facebook representative said in a statement. "We stop processing facial recognition data when someone chooses to opt out."
Nonetheless, the Norwegian investigation has been referred to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC). Although Facebook has more than 955 million monthly active users, its U.S. headquarters in Menlo Park, California, is not responsible for a majority of them.
Facebook's international headquarters is in Dublin, which means that all users outside the U.S. and Canada are questionable to the Irish and European data protection laws.
Facebook, according to a Cnet report, specially chose Dublin for the tax incentives. Businesses are charged approximately 2 percent tax in Dublin compared to 35 percent in the U.S.
Stay tuned for more on this issue.
