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Germany bans Facebook’s new facial recognition technology

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It was a funny moment in May when Mark Zuckerberg bumped into German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G8 meeting in France. Merkel told the 27-year-old billionaire about how much she enjoyed The Social Network; Zuckerberg hadn’t liked it much at all. A telling moment: over the years, Germany and Facebook have often been at odds with each other. Not surprisingly, most of their disagreements have to do with privacy.

The latest development has to with Facebook’s facial recognition feature that helps users tag photos. After joining in the chorus of European nations that objected to the feature launch in June, German authorities are now the first to declare the feature illegal. Hamburg’s data protection official Johannes Caspar claims that the software violates both German and European Union data protection laws and that Facebook users don’t know how to delete the data that Facebook is gathering.

Full story: Germany’s war on Facebook