Facebook strips out facial recognition for the European version of Moments

Nearly a year after the initial launch, Facebook has launched a new version of its Moments photo-sharing tool for Europe and Canada, and there’s one very important difference from its US counterpart: the European version of the app won’t scan your face.

The US version of Moments groups photos by people and places, playing off data from Facebook’s facial-recognition-based photo-tagging system. But courts in both Canada and the European Union have ruled that Facebook’s photo-tagging system violates privacy law, so the European version of the app had to rely on other methods. The new version asks users to manually identify the various faces, then looks for photos that “appear to include the same face” based on broader similarities. The result isn’t as seamless as the US version, but it also doesn’t need to collect biometric data in order to work.

The new version comes as Facebook is fending off a new legal challenge in the US over the legality of its photo-tagging system. Last week, a district court ruled that Facebook’s system is bound by an Illinois law that forbids the collection of biometric data without explicit user consent. The court has yet to decide whether Facebook’s system violates the law. Google is also facing a lawsuit over Google Photos, which performs similar functions to Facebook Moments.