At home, even though Facebook began last December using facial recognition to catalog users' faces so as to automatically make tag suggestions when photos are uploaded, it took a good six months for any substantive of the biometrics feature to surface. There's only occasional media attention here now on how the issue raises privacy and identity theft concerns.

The story has played much differently in Germany, where the country's federal data protection laws are among the world's strictest.

A few weeks ago, the State of Schleswig-Holstein had ordered all state sites to remove Facebook's "like" button, and threatened to impose hefty fines on those that didn't. It said Facebook builds profiles of users and non-users alike with the "like" button's data, which violates German law.

And in early August the head of the German data protection authority asked Facebook to its facial recognition feature and argued that facial recognition amounts to unauthorized data collection on individuals.

"It's obvious that this makes people very nervous when it comes to privacy," said Carsten Casper, a Gartner privacy analyst, reports the .