Facebook is violating privacy laws with the new app center, says German consumer group

by Swati on August 28th, 2012

The German federation of consumer organizations said on Monday that Facebook is violating privacy laws and giving away customer data via its new app centre without notifying users.It has set a deadline of Sept 4 for Facebook to fix the issue, else the social network may face serious legal action.

Early this month, data protection officials in Germany reopened their investigation on Facebook’s facial recognition technology, which compiles photographic archives of the member’s faces, based on the photos uploaded by them. Johannes Caspar, the data protection commissioner in Hamburg, had closed the investigation in June, but decided to reopen it after it failed with its attempts to persuade the social network to change its policies.

“Facebook will be obliged to delete this data unless it obtains approval by all concerned users. Due to the immense potential of misuses of biometric data, the explicit consent is a legal requirement for the collecting and processing of biometric data,” Casper said.

Facebook said in a statement that it was not breaking European Union law with the facial recognition technology.

“We believe that the photo tag suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with E.U. data protection laws. During our continuous dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about photo tag suggest,” the social networking site added.

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