Zuckerberg and co.’s hard-line stance in favor of complete transparency continues to unnerve folks. The recent roll-out of the “Tag Suggestions” feature, in which facial recognition suggests names for people in newly added photos without the permission of the individuals suggested, has even drawn a watchful eye from the European Union.
Data-protection regulators from the group’s 27 nations announced their plans to investigate Facebook, taking issue, in particular, with both “Tag Suggestions” and tagging in general, being default options. “[Tags] of people on pictures should only happen based on people's prior consent and it can't be activated by default," argued one of the watchdogs.
As FB has stated, photo-tagging occurs up to “100 million times a day,” so it isn’t shocking that a practice so common has drawn government attention. Yet, with economies across the world floundering, one would imagine there ought to be more pressing, vital shit to deal with.
[Gizmodo via Business Week]
