Germany Probes Facebook Facial Recognition

German data protection officials have requested that Facebook disable its facial recognition software and delete any previously stored data.

Making facial-recognition technology 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 technology 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, however, security firm Sophos expressed concern that facial recognition had been turned on by default, prompting inquiries from regulators.

Caspar said Facebook stores photo information in a database, so even if someone opts-out of facial recognition, data collected before they made the switch remains. The opt-out system, therefore, is “misleading,” he said, according to a translated version of the letter.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman in Berlin told the New York Times that the company “firmly reject[s] any claim that we are not meeting our obligations under European Union data protection law.”

In addition to Germany, several members of EU’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party—like the U.K., Ireland, and Luxembourg—are investigating the issue.

In the EU, the Data Protection Directive of 1995 requires that people give their consent to the use of their data. Companies that process personal data must tell users about how their information is being used and whether it is passed on to other companies or individuals. The data protection agencies within the EU are responsible for monitoring and enforcing this directive, according to a European Commission spokesman.

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, such as cloud computing and social network sites, are one of the central reasons for this reform,” the spokesman said recently.

Last week, following complaints about from the Connecticut attorney general’s office, Facebook said it will run ads on its homepage with more details about the “Tags Suggestions” facial-recognition service.

Caspar, meanwhile, is no stranger to going after 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 also spearheaded last year’s effort to allows Germans to opt-out of having their homes appear on Google’s Street View.

For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

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Shagbook Attacks Facebook’s Trademark, Calling It Generic

In May, Facebook moved to stop a U.K. dating site called Shagbook from registering a trademark under that name. Now Shagbook is pushing back with a novel claim, saying that the term “facebook” itself is generic and not worthy of a trademark.

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In its filing [PDF] with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Shagbook also says that Facebook has been engaged in “trademark bullying,” pushing around other sites and “abusively using oppositions, litigation, and threats of the same to maintain a competitive market advantage.”

Shagbook also goes into the history of the term “facebook,” noting that “books containing pictures of the members of an organization along with biographical information have been in existence for many decades,” used by college fraternities and other groups. Moving these facebooks online and making them searchable was a natural progression, and by 2003 “various universities and colleges around the country had online books” that were often called facebooks. “Widespread uses of the words ‘face’ and ‘book’ in trademarks… pre-date [Facebook’s] existence by decades,” writes Shagbook’s lawyer.

In an interview with paidContent, Shagbook spokesman Mark Brooks said that the founder of Shagbook—who he declined to name—is an American who has spent many years living in the U.K. The founder has been using the term “Shagbook” in his personal life since the year 2000, and created the Shagbook website as a casual dating site in the U.K. back in 2006, before Facebook was popular.

“He very innocently created the name ‘Shagbook,’ using it to refer to his version of the ‘little black book,’” said Brooks, an online-dating industry consultant who blogs at Online Personals Watch. 

Shagbook, which is based in the U.K. but also operates in the U.S. and several other English-speaking countries, advertises itself as “the hottest place to hook up with local singles for no strings attached adult dating.” The site suggests that users who sign up could “find a naughty date tonight!”

Shagbook’s filing argues that Facebook is a generic term, and that even Facebook itself has used the term in a generic sense. In any case, Shagbook is specifically a dating site, while Facebook is a general-purpose social networking site, which also means it’s unlikely that consumers will be confused, argues Shagbook’s lawyer.

Actually canceling Facebook’s trademark seems like a real longshot for Shagbook, but it’s notable that the company thinks its name is valuable enough to keep this fight up. It will be interesting to see if the company’s legal strategy of using Facebook’s own history of trademark litigation against it goes anywhere.

Some big internet companies have had some success knocking out sites with names they don’t like—eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) is a prime example, having nuked CoinBay, PerfumeBay, and many other examples. But it’s still far from clear if Facebook will be able to keep the internet clean of sites that end in “—book.com,” especially as all websites increasingly incorporate social features.

Facebook’s lawsuits against Teachbook and FacebookOfSex are both ongoing. The company reached a settlement with a parody site called Lamebook, which is still up.

A Facebook spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment about the case.

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