Facebook Face Recognition Policy Upsets German Privacy Regulators

A German privacy regulator is not thrilled that Facebook, everyone's favorite social networking giant, has added facial recognition to a proposed new privacy policy it published on Thursday.

"It is astonishing to find the facial recognition again in the new proposed privacy policy that Facebook published yesterday. We therefore have directly tried to contact officials from Facebook to find out if there is really a change in their data protection policy or if it is just a mistake of translation," Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Johannes Caspar said in an e-mail on Friday.

According to PCWorld, the commissioner is already at odds with the company over its use of face regognition software. It reopened its proceedings against Facebook in August of last year threatening the company with a lawsuit if it didn't obtain explicit consent for face recognition form users or delete the data.

The company has since deleted its software for facial recognition at the urging of both the German office, and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, which suggested that it adjust its privacy policy.

However, on Thursday the site proposed changes to its privacy policy. Among these changes include one related to the tag suggestions feature that uses facial recognition in order to let useres easily tag friends in photos they upload.

"We are able to suggest that your friend tag you in a picture by scanning and comparing your friend's pictures to information we've put together from your profile pictures and the other photos in which you've been tagged. You can control whether we suggest that another user tag you in a photo using the 'Timeline and Tagging' settings," the proposed change reads.

Currently, Facebook uses this recognition feature in the United States in order to help people tag pictures of themselves and their friends more easily. In essence it acts as an efficiency tool but some in Europe aren't comfortable with the option being an automatic feature.