Facebook introduced a facial recognition tool late last year which auto-suggests the identities of the friends in new photos to make tagging them easier. It recently rolled out the feature in other countries, causing Europe to belatedly freak out and leading reputable and reliable U.S. media to cover it as if it were a new feature. The Technology Liberation Front is calling it a “silly privacy moral panic.”
A major privacy advocacy group says it plans to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. Meanwhile, European regulators have already announced that they are launching a probe of Facebook; they do not like that this was introduced as a default feature. A spokesman for the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office tells Businessweek “the privacy issues that this new software might raise are obvious.” Are they? The new technology is simply making easier a process that was already happening: people tagging their friends in photos. Should we also launch an investigation into the facial recognition that our brains do naturally?
There are legitimate concerns about technology making certain processes easier and thus threatening privacy. The one that immediately springs to my mind is law enforcement’s use of GPS tracking devices. Courts are torn on whether automating the process of tailing people by slapping a GPS tracker on their car presents a privacy concern. Police don’t need a warrant to tail you in person, but should they need one to tail you robotically? The Ninth Circuit says no. The Supreme Court will likely weigh in on the issue eventually.
Contrast that with the question of whether Facebook should be auto-identifying you to your friends who already know what you look like. The “privacy issues raised” seem a lot less obvious. I’ve had the feature enabled since it was introduced, and my privacy has not yet been imperiled. If you’re troubled by this, though, you can turn the feature off.
