Facebook Struggles to Adapt to Privacy Pressures Over User Biometrics

Chaos reigns as Facebook struggles to adjust its use of facial recognition to meet the privacy demands of its users and government regulators.

The company’s latest misstep was a notification sent to a journalist in the UK indicating that the user’s facial recognition setting was on. Facebook had switched the setting off for users in the European Union back in 2012 to ensure it did not run afoul of the region’s privacy laws, and has indicated that its approach will be to ask each individual EU user to turn the setting on. In the case of the UK journalist, Facebook subsequently clarified that its notification should have read that the setting was off, as per the default.

It may be a minor case of poor messaging, but it’s one that arrived within a larger tumult over Facebook’s use of biometric data as the implementation date for the EU’s GDPR privacy regulation looms. Seeking to ensure that it won’t be subject to the strict fines associated with the GDPR’s privacy requirement, the social network company recently switched the location for processing of international user data from its headquarters in Ireland – a location meant to help the company evade US taxes – to America, with only EU citizens’ data to be processed in Ireland going forward.

But even in the States, Facebook’s use of facial recognition is coming under intense scrutiny, with a federal judge having decided earlier this month to allow a class action lawsuit over privacy violations against the company to proceed. And that of course came in the wake of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public interrogation by US legislators, which was also largely concerned with how the company managed user data.

Meanwhile, UK journalist and consumer campaigner Martin Lewis is urging Facebook to use facial recognition to scan the site for advertisements fraudulently using celebrities’ images – including his own – to sell dubious products and services. And he’s pressing the issue with a defamation lawsuit holding Facebook responsible for the misdeeds of its advertisers.

Where is this all heading? That, of course, is unclear. But in embracing cutting edge facial recognition technology while pushing the boundaries of digital media with its pioneering social media platform, Facebook is now discovering that life isn’t simple on the frontier.

Sources: TechCrunch, The Guardian

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April 24, 2018 – by Alex Perala