Facebook, Citing Societal Concerns, Plans To Shut Down Facial Recognition System (nytimes.com) 36
Facebook plans to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of more than one billion users and effectively eliminating a feature that has fueled privacy concerns, government investigations, a class-action lawsuit and regulatory woes. From a report: Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, Facebook's newly named parent company, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the social network was making the change because of "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." He added that the company still saw the software as a powerful tool, but "every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance." The decision shutters a feature that was introduced in December 2010 so that Facebook users could save time.
The facial-recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users' digital photo albums and suggested users "tag" them all with a click, linking their accounts to the images. Facebook now has built one of the largest repositories of digital photos in the world, partly thanks to this software. Facial-recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests. Some cities and states have banned or limited the technology to prevent potential abuse.
The facial-recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users' digital photo albums and suggested users "tag" them all with a click, linking their accounts to the images. Facebook now has built one of the largest repositories of digital photos in the world, partly thanks to this software. Facial-recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests. Some cities and states have banned or limited the technology to prevent potential abuse.
Because Meta believes ... (Score:2)
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Why would people want that? Isn't the whole point of a virtual world to create something different than the real world?
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weird for future (Score:2)
I mean I am sure they already have the identities of all people in at least developed nations and a large majority in other countries, so they do not really need this now, but what about the future generations?
A larger and larger % of them will then not be in their DB. Do they just hope to get the information maybe through other methods?
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They hope that everyone born after they changed their name to "Meta" won't ever find out what Facebook has done.
META!!!!!!!11 (Score:2)
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Should say (Score:5, Funny)
If the shareholders had more empathy for humanity the headline would say "Facebook, Citing Societal Concerns, Plans To Shut Down Facebook."
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Mark didn't sell the shareholders voting power with their shares, he retained it.
Thank God. (Score:2)
Yet I know they have a 'shadow' account of me because idiots have uploaded their address book including my address and and tagged photo's with my face.
For me as a frequent traveler this is a great worry, suppose this tech recognises me in a crowd where there is also a wanted criminal, without any further information we might be associated and I'm picked out of the line next time I travel to the USofA.
Yes I know Facebook is not the US government but they
Deleting the data? (Score:1)
Guess we'll just have to trust them on that, but all the crawlers say, *Thanks for the heads up*
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In light of the fact their empire was actually built on lies and "Farmville," I'm not sure what your point is.
read carefully (Score:5, Insightful)
take this specimen:
"...every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance..."
interesting word choice "concern" when a a more opposite term for 'benefit' might be "detriment"
does anyone say "... let's look at the pros and concerns before deciding..."? maybe 'concerns' is just the long version of 'cons' lol (no need ot jump in and tell me that pro/con is from Latin for/against unless you need a way to show off your Latin skills)
and for sure don't ask what 'right balance' means or how it's decided cuz it just gets worse
these slimeball wordsmiths just can't bring themselves to full candor... every phukkin thing needs spin
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how about meta (Score:3)
so facebook is shutting it down, what about the newly formed Meta? was it simply handed up to them, then "Look we are Deleting it" took place at a subsidiary level? I hate being cynical and suspicious but they have earned it.
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I'm certainly of this mindset.. They will most likely spin off another company that will house that data and share with whoever pays.. So its not "Facebook" doing it.. its "company X" (a wholly owned subsidiary of Company Y, who is owned (in the backend) by Meta/Facebook)
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Now that they've digitized all the images and uploaded that data onto their database, they don't need the pictures anymore - so they're deleting the photos.
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There is Second Life but nobody doesn't use it anymore. There are also technical issues such as latency when people should interact in realtime with others (avatars). In Second Life areas are also slow to load.
Awesome! (Score:1)
"DELETING" (Score:2)
I believe Facebook deletes any data just like I believe in fairytales, dragons, sky fairies and the pot of gold at the end of the god damned rainbow. They might close down the feature to the outside, but that data will live forever on their servers with a flag saying, "don't show to the outside until it's profitable enough the blowback doesn't matter."
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Give them a carrot... (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe now when you file a GDPR request they won't send you a binder with all server logs etc, printed on pape
Alternate take (Score:3)
Facebook found that the expense of computing resources needed for their facial recognition system were not outweighed by the additional revenue they acquired from the data the system provided.
in other words (Score:1)
In a totally unrelated announcement: (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook/meta has created a separate company that provides facial recognition services to political groups and armed police forces world wide.
Facebook/meta sees this as a very profitable arena that they will later augment with automatic audio ID and location services. They have been refining their algorithms for years and the amount of detail available in near real time is considered best of breed.
Facebook/meta points out that they only use 'meta data' so they see no privacy issues and assure the public they must submit to the inevitable or be banished.
Thinking out loud here (Score:2)
Facebook, Citing Insurrection Concerns... (Score:1, Troll)
Facebook, citing concern regarding charges stemming from the January 6th US Capitol attack, shuts down tools useful for crowd-sourced identification of January 6th insurrectionists. "While we're not really backing away from facial recognition when it plays to our benefit, we have to pretend that we're distancing ourselves from the technology now that traitors and insurrectionists that we supported on January 6th, 2021, have become easily identifiable to law enforcement and crowd-sourced vigilante projects.
What a bunch of bull (Score:2)
For adults face tagging in normal social photos is quite handy. If you upload something you are embarrassed about to Facebook, please don't. I would totally support not tagging kids, for which there are decent ML algorithms. This was never the problem with Facebook, that would be clickbaiting with confirmation biases vs promoting more pleasant/calm/educational content. Now I want a family oriented social network that does proper face tagging.
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If you upload something you are embarrassed about to Facebook, please don't.
That's not the problem. The problem is when someone else uploads a picture that also happens to contain you, and tags it with your name. I have never signed up for Facebook, but I'm sure that if I did, it would happily link me with whatever photos have been uploaded and tagged as me, and already grouped together as a person who isn't on Facebook... yet. Not that there would necessarily be anything bad about me in there, but I'm not the only one this would happen to.
Facebook to delete it AFTER copying it to Meta (Score:2)
Delete? (Score:2)
Yeah right. They will keep a copy somewhere to reuse later on.