Germany's War on Facebook
Found on The Atlantic Wire on Wednesday, 03 August 2011
The latest development has to with Facebook's facial recognition feature that helps users tag photos. After joining in the chorus of European nations that objected to the feature launch in June, German authorities are now the first to declare the feature illegal.
Facebook collected data about non-Facebook users through the Friend Finder feature and then stored it without permission. German authorities threatened legal action then, but it took Facebook nearly six months before they finally disabled the feature.
Still, the company doesn't seem to be responding too quickly. "We have repeatedly asked Facebook to shut down the facial recognition function and to delete the previously stored data," said Caspar in a statement Tuesday.
Like the article suggests, Facebook looks more and more like the Stasi. They too collected all available information about people without permission. Or without telling them in the first place.