Popular Science News | FaceBook PhotoTag Controversy

Popular Science News – like a lot of new technology, FaceBook PhotoTag sounds like a great idea. You take a family photo, put it on Facebook, fire up the PhotoTag app and away it goes labelling all those on the image who have their photos on FaceBook. What’s wrong with that? Well, for a start, FaceBook needs to have your photo on file in order to do this and it does it without asking your permission. FaceBook insists that it has adhered to all Data Protection legislation but last month the service was suspended pending discussion with regulators.

Mind you, it must be useful to the police who have CCTV footage of people they want quickly recognised. In an imaginary situation you could have the FaceBook Liason Officer uploading the image and, Bob’s your uncle, all the names appear on the image and with a simple click, and permission of FaceBook, all their accounts are accessed and on one or them there is a comment “came into a bit of money last night, my share of a little job me and Mickey did.”

On the other side of the coin, how easy it would be recognising all those photographed at a perfectly legal demonstration and then befriending them on FaceBook to see what they are up to. Obviously this wouldn’t happen in north Cyprus but in one of those totalitarian regimes it might.

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