
Facebook Starts Its Facial Recognition Push To Europeans (techcrunch.com) 7
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Jimmy Nsubuga, a journalist at Metro, is among several European Facebook users who have reported 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.