Facebook opts out of facial recognition for Canada

Facebook Inc. has opted against bringing its new facial recognition feature to Canadian users, offering no specific timeline on the technology’s arrival to the country.
 
The social networking giant’s “tag suggestion” feature, which attempts to automatically scan and identify the names of friends in uploaded Facebook photos, was announced in the U.S. late last year and has been rolled out to some regions. Facebook told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday that the company does not launch every feature it creates globally and has no current plans to push out the feature in Canada.

But the announcement won’t necessarily appease Canadian privacy activists.

David Fewer, director of Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa, said that Facebook needs to obtain active consent before it scans and collects the facial patterns and biometric data of any Canadian. He added that it is unclear from Facebook’s announcement if the social network is actually avoiding this collection among Canadian users.

“Facebook has simply said that it is not offering the service to or about Canadians,” he said.

The fact that Facebook has chosen not to offer this feature to Canadians as an opt-in service underscores the company’s lack of understanding on privacy, Fewer said.

“Privacy laws are about giving Canadians control over their personal information,” he said. “That means giving them the ability to opt-in to this service, not denying the availability of the service entirely. Some Canadians would welcome this feature on Facebook.”

Fewer added that the social network is missing a tremendous opportunity to actually enhance user privacy with this technology. One example, he said, could be notifying a user when they appear in a photograph uploaded to the site.

“Currently, I only know when I’ve been tagged,” he said. “With facial pattern recognition technology, I can also know whenever I’m recognizable in a photo, whether I’ve been tagged or not. It’s disappointing that Facebook is not offering this service.”

Facebook spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment.

The feature has been a point of contention for several U.S. advocacy groups over the last few months, many of which filed complaints with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

A complaint filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in June, which asks the FTC to force Facebook to stop collecting users’ biometric data with opt-in consent, alleges that the social networking giant’s new feature actually violates the site’s own privacy policy. It added that “tag suggestion” also constitutes unfair and deceptive trade practices.

“Facebook possesses the largest collection of photographs of individuals of any corporation in the world,” the letter said. “According to an extrapolation of photo upload data reported by Facebook, the company now possesses about 60 billion photographs. There is every reason to believe that unless the commission acts promptly, Facebook will routinely automate facial identification and eliminate any pretense of user control over the use of their own images for online identification.”

In response to criticism from U.S. politicians and advocacy groups, Facebook went ahead with the feature, but has since started running online ads which promote an opt-out capability. The ads are linked to users’ privacy settings.

– With files from Sharon Gaudin, ComputerWorld U.S.

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‘IPv6 brokenness’ problem appears fixed

QUEBEC CITY — The Internet’s biggest content providers — including Yahoo, Facebook and Google — are reporting a significant
decline in their measurements of “IPv6 brokenness,” a term that describes end users with misconfigured systems that can’t access websites supporting the next-generation
Internet protocol called IPv6.

Worries about IPv6 brokenness have been a major stumbling block for content providers wanting to deploy IPv6, an emerging standard that solves the looming
address shortage with the Internet’s current standard known as IPv4.

Some of the Internet’s most popular websites shared details about their latest IPv6 brokenness measurements at a meeting of
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) held here this week.

DETAILS: Getting at the real truth about IPv6

Experts say the IPv6 brokenness problem is lessening for two reasons: Browsers such as Google’s Chrome have enabled a new
feature called “fast fallback,” which identifies users suffering from IPv6 brokenness and automatically reconfigures their
access to IPv4.

Also, popular websites such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo have engaged in a massive outreach program to users that they feared
would suffer from IPv6 brokenness, offering them automated tools to identify and fix the problem. This outreach program coincided
with World IPv6 Day, a 24-hour trial of IPv6 that was held on June 8.

“Yes, we’ve pretty much fixed the IPv6 brokenness problem,” said IETF Chairman Russ Housley. “It’s because of browsers with
the new ‘fast fix’ and the outreach surrounding World IPv6 Day.”

“IPv6 brokenness is a declining concern generally, as host and browsers implementations deploy fixes,” agreed Christopher
Palmer, an engineer with Microsoft‘s Windows Networking team. He added that Microsoft “received five calls about IPv6 brokenness on World IPv6 Day, and four of them weren’t
real.”

Users suffering from IPv6 brokenness experience slowdowns or have trouble connecting to IPv6-enabled websites because they
have misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment, primarily in their home networks. Corporate users also can experience
IPv6 brokenness because of faulty firewall settings. For end users with IPv6 brokenness, websites that support IPv6 and IPv4
simultaneously in what’s called a dual-stack configuration appear to be suffering from an outage.

Prior to World IPv6 Day, the Internet Society estimated that as many as 0.05% of Internet users would suffer from IPv6 brokenness
during that 24-hour trial. While that percentage may sound miniscule, it actually represents 1 million of the Internet’s estimated
2 billion users.

Yahoo, in particular, worried publicly about the threat of IPv6 brokenness. But Yahoo’s worries appear to be for naught. Igor
Gashinsky, a principal architect with Yahoo, said the company’s measurements of IPv6 brokenness have declined threefold in
the last 21 months, from 0.078% to 0.022%.

“During World IPv6 Day, our breakage stats remained the same at 0.022%,” Gashinsky said.

MORE: Yahoo worries IPv6 upgrade could shut out 1 million Internet users initially

Yahoo’s findings of declining IPv6 brokenness are holding up for other Internet players, including Facebook and Google.

Facebook‘s measurements of IPv6 brokenness have fallen from 0.03% of Internet users down to 0.02% since World IPv6 Day, according
to Donn Lee from Facebook’s network engineering team.

“We estimate that approximately 0.02% of our users will have slowness in loading Facebook if we turn on www.facebook.com with
IPv6 permanently,” Lee said. “That’s what dual-stack brokenness means to us.”

Lee said Facebook sent a message to users that it thought might suffer from IPv6 brokenness prior to World IPv6 Day. He said
it appears that many of these users are fixing the problem themselves.

“Brokenness seems to be declining after World IPv6 Day. It surprises me,” Lee said. “I did not expect any brokenness to change.
I thought the users would suffer in silence. … But it turns out that without any changes to our instrumentation, the dual-stack
brokenness is slowly going down.”

Lorenzo Colitti, a network engineer with Google, said the most important thing Google did for World IPv6 Day was to warn users that it thought would suffer from IPv6 brokenness
ahead of time and encourage them to diagnose their systems.

“We put a drop-down box at the top of the Search page telling users that we’re testing IPv6 on June 8 and that they should
click here to find out if they’re ready,” Colitti said. “We prepared an IPv6 test site for them to use.”

Google also added what it calls “fast fallback” from IPv6 to IPv4 service in its Chrome browser.

“IPv6 brokenness went down 80% to 90% in the Chrome browser,” Colitti said. “If all browsers behaved like that, we would just
publish our Quad A [IPv6] record. Browsers with versions of fast fallback were 99.9995% as reliable as IPv4. We saw similar
behavior in Firefox 7. Apple is adding this [feature] in OS X Lion. All we need is [Microsoft Internet Explorer] to follow suit.”

Palmer wouldn’t comment on when Microsoft would offer a patch for Internet Explorer to handle “fast fallback,” but he indicated
Microsoft planned to address IPv6 brokenness in an upcoming version of the Windows operating system.

BY THE NUMBERS: Most IT pros say their websites, networks will support IPv6 by 2013

IPv6 represents the biggest upgrade to the Internet infrastructure in its 40-year history. That’s because IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, so website operators have to upgrade their network equipment and software to support IPv6 traffic.

The IETF created IPv6 a decade ago because the Internet is running out of addresses using IPv4. The free pool of unassigned
IPv4 addresses expired in February, and in April the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses being held in reserve for startups. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which
doles out IP addresses to network operators in North America, says it will deplete its supply of IPv4 addresses this fall.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet, but IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses
and can connect up a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 offers the promise of faster, less-costly
Internet services than the alternative, which is to extend the life of IPv4 using network address translation (NAT) devices.

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