“We will remove the different templates for facial recognition for more than a billion people,” Jerome Pesanti promised. He is the head of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) department at Meta (formerly Facebook). The group has slowly slipped into a deep crisis – so deep that even the entire group’s name has been changed. Civil rights activists have always vehemently criticized META’s facial recognition. Uploaded photos and videos were evaluated without the explicit consent of those affected.
If you didn’t want to be screened but still wanted to use Metas products, you’d need to search in Settings to turn off face recognition. The legality of this practice has been controversial since the introduction of automatic face recognition on Facebook in 2010. In Europe, Facebook has been recognizing faces since mid-2011.
In the same year, the then Hamburg data protection officer, Johannes Kasper, opened a case against Facebook. But exactly a year later, the case against Facebook’s face recognition was suspended. Because the Data Protection Authority of Ireland was primarily responsible.
absurd conversations with students
Austrian data protection activist Max Schrems, who was a law student at the time, called the Irish authorities. In an absurd move, officials then ordered a conversation between Facebook and the Viennese student.
Back then, Facebook claimed that users would agree to “everything” when they first registered, including biometric analysis of their faces. The data company was never able to conclusively explain how third parties should bind what can be seen on uploaded photos. This year, Facebook had to pay $350 to each user in the US state of Illinois as compensation for unwanted facial recognition — a total of $650 million.
Facebook originally borrowed the necessary algorithms from Israeli start-up Face.com before Facebook bought the technology for facial recognition without much ado, including start-ups. The automatic facial recognition system will be deactivated across the group “over the next few weeks”.
Because after more than a decade, legislators and data protection authorities are slowly leaving. And Meta, which just thought it was recovering from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, has slipped into even deeper trouble as a result of the new revelations. A whistleblower says Facebook is incompatible with democracy.
Meta asks for manual tagging
Meta needs good news. Now comes after the Nicaraguan government deleted 1,300 campaign accounts on Facebook shortly before the election Declaration of removal face recognition profile.
“This is part of a company-wide ban on the use of facial recognition across all of our products. It was not an easy decision as there are many places where facial recognition was extremely useful to people,” Pesanti said on Twitter. Facebook. But we had to weigh it against the growing public concern about facial recognition as a whole. Regulators are still working on clear rules for the technology. So we are restricting its use to a narrow area. “
Meta doesn’t drop face recognition entirely. Meta intends to continue to biometrically evaluate faces for identification to unlock a device, to combat fraud and identity presumption, or to access a blocked account. As far as other areas of application are concerned, Pecenti says, an open debate is essential, which he looks forward to.
Disabling face recognition for the blind and visually impaired Facebook users does harm. Alt text automatically created for images can no longer tell who has been photographed. Also, there is no automatic notification of Facebook users if they can be seen in a photo uploaded by someone else. Meta wants to encourage users to manually enter which ones can be seen in which photos and videos. Meta is certainly still interested in data collection.
(DS)
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