Germany questions Facebook about facial recognition feature

IDG News Service - Facebook is facing fresh concerns from German data protection officials that its automatic facial recognition feature may violate European privacy regulations.

Hamburg’s Data Protection Agency (DPA) sent a letter to Facebook on Tuesday saying the social networking site should get users’ consent before their biometric data, used to enable the tagging feature, is stored, said Johannes Caspar, head of the agency, on Thursday. Although users can opt out of the feature, the DPA contends that the process is unclear, he said.

Facebook enabled the facial recognition feature in December in the U.S. and has now rolled it out in most countries. The system makes suggestions for tags based on faces in other photographs that have been tagged. Users are notified only after they’ve been tagged.

Users can opt out of the facial recognition feature within the privacy settings on their Facebook accounts. To do that, a user would need to go into the “Customize Settings” panel and disable “Suggest photos of me to friends.” A person can still be tagged manually but only by their friends.

Caspar said European Union privacy regulations require that users give their consent before their data is stored, including data used to enable tagging.

“It is clear that everybody whose data will be stored has to consent, and consent is something more than not to reject,” Caspar said.

Facebook has two weeks to respond to the letter. The DPA has also notified the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which advises the European Commission on data protection issues.

In a statement, Facebook said “we will consider the points the Hamburg Data Protection Authority have made about the photo tag suggest feature but firmly reject any claim that we are not meeting our obligations under European Union data protection law.”

The company further contended that its users like the photo tag suggest feature, “which makes it easier and safer for them to manage their online identities.”

If the two sides can’t reach an agreement, Caspar could fine Facebook up to €300,000 (US$426,000). But Caspar said his agency has a good working relationship with Facebook, and the two sides reached agreement earlier this year on Facebook’s “Friend Finder” feature.

Friend Finder imports e-mail addresses from user contact lists on other e-mail services and then sends out invitations to non-Facebook users to join the site. The DPA contended Facebook was collecting e-mail addresses without a user’s consent and that it was unclear to users why they were receiving an invite.

Under the agreement, Facebook tweaked its systems so that a person who is not signed up with the social networking site can opt out of receiving further invitations from that initial invitation.

“We had a successful negotiation,” Caspar said.

Hamburg’s DPA has taken a leading role in data protection issues in Europe. In 2009, the agency launched an extensive investigation into Google’s Street View imagery program, questioning how the company stored data for users who did not want their properties shown and how thoroughly it censors parts of images such as people’s faces.

Google and the DPA eventually reached an agreement on a dozen or so concerns the agency had about Street View.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com

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For Google+, off to a speedy start

There’s something to be said for starting a social networking site with the backing of a web behemoth.

The new Google+ is growing at a faster rate than Facebook, Twitter and MySpace did, becoming the first social networking site to hit 25 million users within its first five weeks, according to a study from comScore.

It took the other three sites at least 18 months to get to that point.

Though all three still have bigger overall audiences than Google+, it’s only a matter of months, if not weeks, before this new player overtakes MySpace with its 35 million users. And if its growth pace continues, it should surpass Twitter’s more than 105 million users within the year.

Facebook will be a different story. ComScore notes it would take some time for Google+ to match that site’s 750 million users, and there’s no betting it will.

As analysts point out, there’s a huge difference between 100 million and 750 million.

Still, the general rule is that once a social network has reached 20 percent of active internet users in a market, it’s here to stay. Google+ is currently around 12 percent in the U.S.

The main thing Google+ has going for it is, of course, its association with Google. Unlike MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, which were the products of good ideas from relative internet newbies backed by venture capitalists, Google+ has a natural platform to launch from via the roughly 180 million people who engage with Google each month.

Many are finding their way to Google+ through the popular Google email program, Gmail. But the site has also received tons of media attention and, ironically, people are sharing their affection for Google+ on Facebook and Twitter.

Though most of Google+’s traffic is coming from the United States, India is also seeing a good deal of growth on the site, which launched June 28.

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Meanwhile, here are some other social media stories that have the web buzzing this week:

* Last week Media Life reported that Facebook was deploying a video instructing users on how to disable its new photo-tagging feature, but apparently that move is not good enough for German regulator Johannes Caspar, the data protection supervisor in Hamburg. He wants the world’s biggest social network to disable the service permanently because it may violate privacy laws in Europe.

If Facebook does not reply to the letter Caspar sent yesterday, he could fine the company $426,000, according to reports.

* Forget stuffing ballot boxes, is Republican Newt Gingrich stuffing his Twitter feed? That’s the allegation from Gawker, which claims just 8 percent of the 2012 presidential hopeful’s 1.3 million Twitter followers are real people. The rest are spambots, inactive or dummy accounts tied to his campaign, according to an analysis by social media search company PeekYou cited by Gawker. Gingrich’s campaign harrumphed to ABC News that those allegations were bogus.

* If you’re still using the old Twitter interface, you’re in for a change this week. A full year after it was rolled out, the new Twitter will replace all of the old versions this week. The social networking site had been allowing users to choose the old or new platform as it refined the new one and ironed out some kinks. But earlier this week, Twitter announced on its account that it was finally phasing out the old version.

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