Norway's Regulator Questions Privacy Implications Of Facebook's Facial Recognition

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Norway's Regulator Questions Privacy Implications Of Facebook's Facial Recognition [bloomberg.com]

Facebook Inc. (FB) is being probed by Norway’s data-protection regulator over concerns a facial- recognition program that automatically suggests people’s names to tag in pictures breaches privacy rights.

“It’s a very powerful tool Facebook has and it’s not yet clear how it all really works,” Bjorn Erik Thon, Norway’s data- protection commissioner, said in a phone interview today. “They have pictures of hundreds of millions of people. What material Facebook has in its databases is something we need to discuss with them.”

Data-protection regulators from the 27-nation European Union have been looking into Facebook’s facial-recognition feature. Earlier this year, the EU’s so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said the feature can only be used with people’s consent.

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I seem to recall having to manually opt-out of this feature some time back. I think it should have been an opt-in system from the beginning. One can only imagine the amount of facial recognition data they've accumulated by now...