No. Deleting those pictures would be part of trying to get rid of that person. It would be like burning love letters. If you respect a person you should never do that. In addition, I don't think it is a normal generalization but your personal view.

What makes you denigrate sexual encounters in this way? Speaking only of my own experience I can say that sexuality has always been quite a beautiful part of my contacts with other people. Besides, I did not say that I need those pictures to remember, but I would concur that pictures help to remember, perhaps that is one of the reasons people take pictures in the first place. Furthermore, it is no insult to be mentally ill, try harder. :)

This is probably the core of this court decision: the judges share your opinion. They think taking pornographic pictures is indecent and no modest person should indulge in this. If you look closely you will notice, that this thinking needs some condemation of sexuality itself.

It is possible to think differently, though. I would even go as far as saying: Not taking pornographic pictures is an indicator for a lack of love of the other person or ones own body. As you said, you need to be responsible and talk about how these pictures may be used, but beyond that I cannot see any consequences you should fear.

Have you considered that maybe your view of relationships might not be universal? There are many people who will value a relationship highly even after it ends, everything you say seems to be negative. If a person dwells on a mental image of an ex it apparently has been a time well spent with this person. It would be a terrible world indeed where we would stop remembering the good times we had together with some loved one.

That's a truism, as any believe in anything is based on trust in our own mind, our senses, the trustworthyness of some sources and so on. On the other hand it is definitely not necessary to trust a single entity as the DNSSEC infrastructure, giving each other trust in a hippy fashion by PGP-like infrastructures is always a possibility, even if you are clearly opposed to that.

Any system depending on the integrity of a single entitiy will be measured on the amount of power, social skills or money needed to break this integrity. Is this spreading useless fear? I don't think so.

At least in Germany you have a quite complicated situation, as any contract via fax is valid in principle but will not automatically stand up in court as proof, as it is open to free evaluation by the judge (freie richterliche Würdigung). So, depending on the circumstances, you might not succeed in convincing the judge. Thus, not one of my customers depends on the legal validity of fax, and never has. As email obseleted fax most switched to software based fax or providers offering you a free fax-to-mail gateway. This setup is even less valid as a proof, but it is simply not important. Especially, as nearly noone who is doing business is without email.

Done in 2007: https://extras.skype.com/486/view

In the Thames Valley Police Facebook page you will find a video asking you to inform the police via twitter if you notice anything suspicious.

This does certainly not mean governments would not want the ability to shut down communications, they still might come to the conclusion that shutting down the net or telephones would be a better idea. But things will get interesting the moment politicians actually start to understand the net.

The solution is simple as well, just look at Google and China. Or, more direct, if I want to see the net without German censorship I certainly use google.com, not google.de. If the people of Germany want to use the features, which might no longer be supported on facebook.de (currently under Irish legislation) they will simply switch to facebook.com.

Regarding your problem with identity I must say that I am a strong proponent of clear name policy, but even without Facebook or any other social network will eventually have identity, simply by usage. Trust in governmental or corporate identity control is probably not what we should rely on. With Facebook you and your community will be in control of this information and even disinformation, with restricted databases it will only be the corporations and governments.

In Germany you are allowed to take pictures of any person, you just need their permission to publish or exhibit KunstUrhG 22 with uploading usually being publication. Since 2004 you are not allowed to take pictures of people without their consent inside someones home or similar secured spaces StGB 201a. Outside these special locations you won't need a permission if people are just accessories ("Beiwerk") or part of an assembly ("Versammlung") or parade ("Aufzug") or similar KunstUrhG 23.

Very nice analysis of the german situation and the reasons for the current state of the german privacy discussion.

Nonetheless I think the Facebook bashing in general and in particular the facial recognition feature is moot. As always, the net will route against any obstacles it encounters, no oppressive state can suppress the freedom of information for long. Should germany implement blocking of unwanted content people will start using proxies to access Facebook. If Facebook stops using facial recognition other sites will pop up who will enable people to use it.

An oppressive state will forbid the use of data by the people while using data extensively itself. The question is not if data like (face,name) pairs is collected as anything which is technically feasible and economically viable will be done, the question is Will I, too, be allowed to use this data? I use Facebook, I pay my usage by handing over data on myself, this is a fair trade. In return I am enabled to access data of the people of the world, this will ultimately lead to the disappearance of the misconception of privacy and will be our best bet on fighting oppression.

Our speech is a culturally evolved natural capability of humans. Using speech implies the expectation of an intelligent human as a receiver, alleviating this problem by not trying to create the illusion of intelligence will nevertheless force people to use an intelligent, human ability in a degraded, humiliating way. Not even Artificial Intelligence which will probably create intelligent systems in maybe 30 years will essentially change the situation as it won't be expected behaviour these AI systems will be producing, there is currently no intention of creating anything having all limitations humans have. If, on the other hand, this changes, it might actually work, but you have to expect these systems to really not understand you and be unwilling to help or producing lots of errors if they have a bad day, perhaps because their lover broke up with them or the wages are to low.

Before I was given the proof I could immediately understand ( http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1701394&cid=32729242) I started a little OpenOffice database to give me some experimental evidence. This OpenOffice Base file unfortunately has one error which keeps me from checking bigger datasets but at least it did show me that 100,000 families is not enough. The probability for a brother ranges between 0.42 and 0.51 in my runs.