Facebook faces EU probe over face recognition feature

Facebook Inc is facing a probe by EU data-protection regulators which concerns a face recognition softwarefeature 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 conduct a study of the feature for possible rule violations, according to Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party.
 
Authorities in the UK and Ireland said they would also look into the photo-tagging function on the world's most popular social-networking service. 

According to Lommel, tags of people on pictures should only happen with the prior consent of the concerned people and default use was not acceptable. He said such automatic tagging could create a lot of risks for users and the European data-protection officials would ''clarify to Facebook that this can't happen like this.'' 

In its blog yesterday, Facebook said, that ''Tag Suggestions'' were available in most countries after being phased in over several months. It added when a Facebook user added a photo to their page, the feature uses facial-recognition software to suggest names of people in the photo on the basis of  pictures in which they have already been identified. Before the feature was introduced, users could tag pictures manually without permission from their Facebook friends. 

Explaining its position on the feature that is active by default on existing users' accounts Facebook said, in its blog, if users preferred to not let their names be automatically suggested for other people's pictures, they could de-activate the feature. 

''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.''