Facebook joins ID2020, fined $5.5M for facial recognition violations by South Korea

Facebook is the latest company to join ID2020 to contribute to its efforts pioneering user-managed, privacy-protecting digital ID.

According to a statement from ID2020 on its latest member, Facebook has joined the ID2020 Technical Advisory Committee “to learn and build on standards for digital ID that are secure and privacy-centric.”

ID2020 has prominently been leading the Good Health Pass Collaborative.

The announcement comes hours after South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission banned Facebook from processing digital identity numbers without legal basis and issued the social media behemoth with its second-largest ever fine for creating and storing facial recognition templates of 200,000 local users without proper consent from April 2018 to September 2019, reports The Register.

Facebook was fined a further 26 million won (US$22,000) for illegally collecting ID numbers (Resident Registration Numbers) and not issuing notifications on changes to the management of personal information, according to the PIPC statement.

The 6.46 billion won ($5.5 million) for Facebook’s non-compliant use of facial recognition is the second-largest the PIPC has issued, though its largest, at 6.7 billion, also went to Facebook in November 2020 for passing on personal data to other operators without user permission, notes The Register.

The company has been issued with correction orders to destroy facial recognition information collected without consent and has been prohibited from processing resident registration numbers without legal basis. A further notice for improvement asks Facebook to make it easy for users to check legal notices when it asks for additional personal information.

Netflix was also issued with much smaller fines for data collection without consent, and Google was issued with a recommendation to improve its data handling and to make legal notices more precise.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  data protection  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  Facebook  |  facial recognition  |  ID2020  |  privacy