Facebook starts its facial recognition push to Europeans
Facebook starts its facial recognition push to Europeans
By Natasha April 20, 2018
Facebook users in Europe are reporting that the company
has started giving them the option to turn on its controversial facial
recognition technology.
Jimmy Nsubuga, a journalist at Metro, is among several
European Facebook users who have reporting getting notifications asking if they
want to turn on face recognition technology.
Facebook has previously said an opt-in option would be
pushed out to all European users, and also globally, as part of changes to its
T&Cs and consent flow.
In Europe the company is hoping to convince users to
voluntarily allow it to deploy the privacy-hostile tech — which was turned off
in the bloc after regulatory pressure, back in 2012, when Facebook began using
facial recognition to offer features such as automatically tagging users in
photo uploads.
But under impending changes to its T&Cs — ostensibly
to comply with the EU’s incoming GDPR data protection standard — the company
has crafted a manipulative consent flow that tries to sell people on giving it their
data; including filling in its own facial recognition blanks by convincing
Europeans to agree to it grabbing and using their biometric data after all.
Users who choose not to switch on facial recognition
still have to click through a ‘continue’ screen before they get to the off
switch. On this screen Facebook attempts to convince them to turn it on — using
manipulative examples of how the tech can “protect” them.
As another Facebook user who has also already received
the notifications — journalist, Jennifer Baker — points out, what it’s doing
here is incredibly disingenuous — because it’s using fear to try to manipulate
people’s choices.
Under the EU’s incoming data protection framework
Facebook cannot automatically opt users into facial recognition — it has to
convince people to switch the tech on themselves. So it is emphasizing that
users can choose whether or not to enable the technology.
But data protection experts we spoke to earlier this week
do not believe Facebook’s approach to consent will be legal under GDPR.
Essentially, this is big data-powered manipulation of
human decision-making — until the ‘right’ answer (for Facebook’s business) is
‘selected’ by the user. In other words, not freely given, informed consent at
all.
Legal challenges are certain at this point.
A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed to TechCrunch that any
European users who are being asked about the tech now, ahead of the May 25 GDPR
deadline, are part of its rollout of platform changes intended to comply with
the incoming standard.
“The flow is not a test, it is part of a rollout we are
doing across the EU,” she said. “We are asking people for opt-in consent for
three things — third party data for ads, facial recognition and the permission
to process their sensitive data.”
She also confirmed that Facebook did run a test of “a
very similar version of this flow to a small percentage of users in the EU back
in March”, adding: “The flow + wording was broadly the same. At all times it
was opt-in.”
The problem is, given Facebook controls the entire
consent flow, and can rely on big data insights gleaned from its own platform
(of 2BN+ users), this is not even remotely a fair fight. Manipulated acceptance
is not consent.
But legal challenges take time. And in the meanwhile
Facebook users are being socially engineered, with selective examples and
friction, into agreeing with things that align with the company’s
data-harvesting business interests — handing over sensitive personal data
without understanding the full implications of doing so.
It’s not clear exactly how many Facebook users were part
of the earlier flow test. It’s likely the company used the aforementioned
variations in wording to determine — via an A/B testing process — which consent
screens were most successful at convincing people to accept the highly
privacy-hostile technology.
Last month — when Facebook said it would be rolling out
“a limited test of some of the additional choices we’ll ask people to make as
part of GDPR” — it also said it would start “by asking only a small percentage
of people so that we can be sure everything is working properly”.
Interestingly it did not put a number on how many people
were involved in that test. And Facebook’s spokeswoman did not provide an
answer when we asked.
The company was likely hoping the test would not attract
too much attention — given how much GDPR news is flowing through its PR
channels, and how much attention the topic is generally sucking up.
But depending on how successful those tests prove to be
at convincing Europeans to let it have and use their facial biometric data,
millions of additional Facebook users could soon be providing the company with
fresh streams of sensitive data — and having their fundamental rights trampled
on, yet again, thanks to a very manipulative consent flow.
This article was updated with a series of corrections
after Facebook confirmed the notifications are in fact the rollout of its new
consent flow, not part of the earlier tests. It has also told us categorically
that no users were auto-enrolled in facial recognition tech in Europe — even in
the test. So we’ve updated this article accordingly.
Image Credits: Franck Boston / Shutterstock
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