Facebook Facial Recognition

Author: Chris Cook

Last week Facebook was accused of invading personal privacy “by stealth” after it started using facial recognition technology without informing its users.  The technology scans faces of people in tagged pictures and matches that information with other pictures to allow users to tag them automatically.

The technology has been used in the US version of Facebook for a number of months, although in that situation users were informed of the pending introduction of facial recognition technology weeks in advance.

While the majority of users will not be concerned as to the introduction of this technology, concerned users are able to disable the technology by adjusting their privacy settings so as to effectively “opt out” of the service.  However, bearing in mind the current data protection legislation, there is some debate as to whether Facebook has gone about this in the right way.

Where individuals can be identified from photographs on the Facebook site, the information will constitute personal data within the remit of the Data Protection Act 1998.  This in turn would necessitate the person using the photographs to have obtained the consent of all of the individuals appearing in the photograph before posting on a social networking site.  While this would not necessarily be a problem where those individuals are tagged to each other on the Facebook site, it is arguably an infringement of the Data Protection Act for processing personal information without having obtained prior consent.

These issues can also be translated into the workplace, where photographs of employees routinely appear on business websites without due consideration having been given to legal compliance issues.  It is important to obtain prior written consent from all individuals for their photograph to appear on your business’ website before it is used.

If you feel that the time has come to review your business’ usage of personal data belonging both to customers and employees to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act, please contact Chris Cook on 01727 798019 or by email at chris.cook@salaw.com