Facebook Inc. will be probed by European Union data-protection regulators over a feature that suggests people’s names to tag in pictures without their permission.
A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the EU’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rules violations, said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Ireland’s data protection authority is also looking into the photo-tagging issue, said spokeswoman Ciara O’Sullivan.
“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default,” said Lommel. Such automatic tagging “can bear a lot of risks for users” and the group of European data protection officials will “clarify to Facebook that this can’t happen like this.”
Facebook, owner of the world’s most popular social- networking service, said on its blog yesterday that “Tag Suggestions” are available in most countries after being phased in over several months. The feature uses facial-recognition software and when a user posts a new photo to their Facebook page it suggests peoples’ names based on pictures in which they have already been tagged.
Default Setting
The feature is active by default on existing users’ accounts and Palo Alto, California-based Facebook explains on its blog how people can disable the function if they don’t want their names to be automatically suggested in other people’s pictures.
“We launched Tag Suggestions to help people add tags of their friends in photos; something that’s currently done more than 100 million times a day,” Facebook said in an e-mailed statement. “Tag Suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested.”
Facebook is among U.S. companies that have faced scrutiny in the EU for possible privacy breaches. Google Inc. (GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Yahoo! Inc. have been pushed by European data- protection officials to limit the amount of time they store online users’ search records. The group has also criticized Facebook for policy changes that could harm users’ privacy.
The Article 29 group guides the work of national data protection agencies, which have the power to punish companies that break privacy rules.
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