Tagging people on Facebook these days is easy as pie. If ten of you run off to Thailand for a two week break you’re going to come back with a fair amount of photos and a whole lot of people to tag in them. But, in steps Facebook’s ingenious facial recognition and bam, most of them will be automatically tagged for you. I see it as a reason to go on more holidays. Other’s see it as “the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world” and are not exactly ecstatic about it.

Carlo Licata, from the US, has taken the matter to court.

The lawsuit alleges that this facial-recognition program violates the privacy of its users, citing an Illinois law called the Illinois Biometrics Information Privacy Acts, which requires companies to get written content from a user if it is collecting biometric data.

Facebook started the auto-tagging in 2012 after it bought Israeli company Face.com and has been under fire ever since. At a Senate hearing to discuss the tagging, Facebook’s Robert Sherman argued that it is “merely a ‘convenience feature’ and that users’ data is secure”.

The company’s faceprint database works only with its own software, and “alone, the templates are useless bits of data,” Sherman said. He said that users can opt out of the feature and their data will be deleted.

Facebook in Europe does not have the tagging-suggestion, and anyone around the world can disable the service in their account. Licata hopes to “get a court injunction that requires Facebook to put a halt to the program”.

What’s he hiding that he doesn’t want anyone to see?

[Source: Business Insider]