Mass, commercial identification of people appearing in porn
<p>Someone on the Internet claims (I'll call this person "the operator" below):</p>

<ul>
<li>They have crawled around 100TB of data from both mainstream social networking sites, and porn sites with user-generated content;</li>
<li>They have used facial identification, behavior identification and voice identification to match identities, linking 100 thousand social networking profiles to people appearing in porn;</li>
<li>They plan to offer a commercial service, where presumably users can look up a certain person to see whether they have appeared in porn. The service is touted as a way to "check whether your partner has been a sex worker";</li>
<li>They claim to be located in Germany.</li>
</ul>

<p>Assuming the operator is truthful in their claims, my questions is: what kind of legal problems might they face?</p>

<ul>
<li>Has the operator made an offense under criminal law in anything they did? Is it illegal to collect and store the data, do matching between such data, or provide the matching data to other people?</li>
<li>If other parties are to bring lawsuit to the operator, how likely are they to prevail?

<ul>
<li>If a person was identified to have appeared in porn, can they sue the operator for defamation or something else? Does the person need to prove that the identification caused damage? Does it matter whether the identification is correct or not? Does it matter if the "porn" is in fact surreptitiously recorded and uploaded without the person's consent?</li>
<li>Do the data sources (social networking sites, porn sites) have ground to sue the operator? What if the operator never state the source of the data in their service?</li>
<li>Since the persons identified, the users of the service and the data sources are likely to be overseas, which jurisdiction's laws govern these potential lawsuits?</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

<p>If the commercial service is in Germany, then they are in for <strong>loads of trouble</strong>.</p>

<hr>

<p><strong>Persönlichkeitsrecht</strong> (in German) </p>

<p><a href="https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pers%C3%B6nlichkeitsrecht_(Deutschland)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pers%C3%B6nlichkeitsrecht_(Deutschland)</a></p>

<p><strong>The right of protection of personality</strong> is a constitutional right that has been confirmed in many ways by the constitutional courts.</p>

<p>A corporation may only be registered / licenced (and retain that registry)</p>

<ul>
<li>when they are <strong>knowledgeable</strong> of and <strong>obey</strong> all laws pertaining to their business </li>
</ul>

<p>A corporation that bases it business on an <strong>illegal activity</strong> risks being reported to the responsible <strong>Gewerbeamt</strong>, where the process could be started to <strong>revolk</strong> the licence. </p>

<p>Charges can also be made, which could lead (when found guilty) to the same. </p>

<p>Each person effected can also do the same, with or without claims of damages, since the participation in a <strong>legal</strong> porn (i.e. no minors or force) is legal and is otherwise (other than when viewing the bought version) <strong>nobody elses business</strong>. </p>

<p>Illegal collection of private data will also cause them headaches. </p>

<hr>

<p>For the perpose supplied (<em>check if you partner has been a sex worker</em>) the chances that it would succeed </p>

<ul>
<li>are very high</li>
</ul>

privacy germany defamation