PhotoTagging
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Facebook can't stop lawsuit over its facial recognition software
Facebook will have to battle it out in court over a lawsuit that claims the social network's facial recognition software violates an Illinois privacy act. This week, a San Fransisco federal judge denied Facebook's motion to dismiss the case. The suit alleges that Facebook's facial recognition and photo-tagging system violates Illinois' 2008 Biometric Information Privacy Act, which states that companies must receive explicit consent to collect identifiers including fingerprints and, in this case, faceprints.
Germany challenges Facebook on facial recognition, citing EU privacy laws
Facebook's facial recognition feature probably won't find too many smiles in Germany, where federal regulators are challenging the social network to change its ways, or face the consequences. On Tuesday, Hamburg's Data Protection Authority (DPA) sent a letter to the company, advising it to obtain user permission before harvesting biometric data, as outlined by EU privacy laws that require consumer consent. As it stands right now, users can opt-out of the photo-tagging function by tinkering with their privacy settings, but the DPA claims that's still too invasive, and has "repeatedly" asked Facebook to shut down the feature altogether. Zuckerberg & Co. now have two weeks to respond to the letter, and could face a fine of up to €300,000 (about $427,000) if a compromise isn't reached. In a statement, company spokeswoman Tina Kulow said, "We will consider the points the Hamburg Data Protection Authority have made... but firmly reject any claim that we are not meeting our obligations under European Union data protection law."
Facebook granted patent for tagging digital media
It's taken the US Patent and Trademark Office four and half years to consider it, but Facebook now finally has a patent on one of its central features: photo tagging. Applied for in October 2006 and just granted this week, this legal doc gives Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of his buddies credit for designing a method for identifying users in "a selection of an item of digital media." That could be photos, video, audio, or text -- the main drive of the patent is that it lets people associate a given chunk of media with a person and inform others of this association. The wording of Facebook's claims is rather specific -- you have to, for example, allow the identified person the opportunity to reject the identification -- so having this patent need not necessarily preclude other sites like Flickr from engaging in similar, but not identical, behavior.
Facebook adds face detection, still can't identify books
Over 100 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, making the social networking site something of a clearinghouse for random holiday snaps. Of course, those holiday snaps quite often contain people, and its in tagging those people that the whole process of adding photos to Facebook slows down a bit -- finding faces, drawing boxes, typing names, etc. Those first two steps are now in the process of being automated thanks to recent Facebook acquisition Divvyshot. Facebook will now identify faces in your photos after you upload them, automatically, just like any 'ol cheap compact shooter can do. Sadly it won't identify who that face is yet (you still need to type in a name), but this simple addition should make tagging much, much easier. However, we're still waiting for Google Street View's auto face blurring technology to make an appearance before we start uploading the greatest moments from our last vacation.
