There are times when companies just forget about the impact to consumers. Most times these little oversights are caught and removed before the products or services are dropped on the unsuspecting consumers. Still there are times when these things get pushed out because the company in question is too big or too arrogant to believe they can’t do what they want.

A good example of this is Google Street View. There is nothing like a free service that allows anyone to see your home, the cars you drive etc. Google even had the temerity to send their cars onto clearly marked private roads.

Now let’s move forward to today, Facebook wants to put facial recognition software into their API to quickly tag people in photographs. The problem is that this software collects data about the people in the pictures. There is also no easy way to remove this data by the user. Facebook thinks that collecting this and other data is ok (as it is not in violation of any US law which are notorious for not protecting privacy or fair usage). However, Facebook did not count on some very strict (as they should be) privacy laws in Germany. Germany has actually declared the new feature illegal and is going after Facebook to disable the feature and to remove all data collected by the service.

I only wish that there were laws this protective of the average citizen in the US.

Source Fudzilla

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