When Facebook began rolling out a tool in the U.S. last December that enables easier photo-tagging, relatively few people complained.
But now that the feature is rolling out to the rest of the
world, including Europe -- which has broad privacy laws -- more people are taking note. The result is a new wave of criticism, including at least one official probe, in Europe.
For the most part, the criticism in the
U.S. centers more on how Facebook deployed the feature than on its capabilities. Facebook, as is its modus operandi, implemented the automatic facial recognition by default; that is, users who don't
want Facebook to recognize them in photos and suggest their names to friends must opt out of the feature.
By now, that procedure shouldn't surprise anyone. Facebook over and over again
implements new features that affect users' privacy and then puts the burden on them to opt out.
But of all of Facebook's myriad revisions to its privacy settings, this one probably is among
the least significant, given that people already can tag friends without their permission.
Nonetheless, Facebook probably picked the wrong time to launch a new feature on an opt-out basis.
The Federal Trade Commission made clear earlier this year that it's concerned about companies revising settings in a way that gives users less privacy without first obtaining opt-in consent: One of
the terms of the commission's settlement with Google over the Buzz debacle is that the company will obtain
users' explicit permission before sharing their information more broadly than its privacy policy allowed at the time of collection. (When Google debuted Buzz, the service revealed information about
the names of users' email contacts if users activated Buzz without changing the defaults.)
Today, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), co-chairman of the Bi-Partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus,
added his name to the roster of critics. "Requiring users to disable this feature after they've already been included by Facebook is no substitute for an opt-in process," he said in a statement. "If
this new feature is as useful as Facebook claims, it should be able to stand on its own, without an automatic sign-up that changes users' privacy settings without their permission."