FB Backs Down: Tech Giant Ends Its Facial Recognition System!
Facebook announced that they would stop using their platform’s facial recognition system, automatically identifying users and tagging them in images. The feature is optional, and the Tech Giant has still drawn intense scrutiny about the extent to which they may or may not violate their user’s privacy and safety.
Reuters reported:
Facebook Inc. announced on Tuesday it is shutting down its facial recognition system which automatically identifies users in photos and videos, citing growing societal concerns about the use of such technology.
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“Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook in a blog post. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”
The removal will roll out globally and is expected to be complete by December, a Facebook spokesperson said.
The removal of face recognition by the world’s largest social media platform comes as the tech industry has faced a reckoning over the past few years amid criticism that the technology could falsely identify people as part of crimes, or favor white faces over people of color.
Facebook has also been under intense scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over user safety and a wide range of abuses on its platforms.
The AP press shared that they will delete more than 1 billion face prints.
BREAKING: Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people. “This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history,” said a blog post. https://t.co/X0VNLDtaCB
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 2, 2021
The news is a massive blow to FB, and the water still boils in the tech giant billionaire’s pot.
FB announcement appeared months after a monumental settlement FB was ordered to make to the tune of $650 million.
Business Insider reported on this in February:
Judge approves $650 million settlement of Facebook privacy lawsuit linked to facial photo tagging
A federal judge has approved a settlement in which Facebook will pay $650 million to users who sued the social media company over its tagging feature.
The settlement, which is one of the largest-ever from a privacy lawsuit, was a “landmark result,” said US Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California in his Friday order. About 1.6 million people who joined the lawsuit will receive a payout of at least $345, the lawsuit said.
“Overall, the settlement is a major win for consumers in the hotly contested area of digital privacy,” wrote Judge Donato. “The standing issue makes this settlement all the more valuable because Facebook and other big tech companies continue to fight the proposition that a statutory privacy violation is a genuine harm.”
The class-action case was first filed in Illinois in 2015. Facebook users claimed the company had violated the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, which prohibits a private entity from collecting, storing, or using biometric identifiers or information without prior notification and written consent.
Take a look at the video:
It’s exactly what happens when the people stand for their rights and liberties. The more we stand for our rights, the more pressure we place on companies like FB, Twitter, Snapchat, and others, the more they are forced to give transparency into the true motives.
One of the motives was questioned recently regarding FB inc’s Instagram.
The New York Post reported:
Facebook has conducted internal studies that found Instagram is harmful to teen girls and exacerbates body image issues, anxiety and depression — even though the company’s executives have publicly extoled the mental-health benefits of social media, a new report says.
Facebook for the past three years has been conducting studies into how its Instagram app affects its millions of young users, repeatedly finding that it’s toxic for many of them, especially teenage girls, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing internal documents.
“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers reportedly wrote in a March 2020 presentation.
Do you remember when FB emerged online? It was in 2004, to Harvard students.
Time reported:
Remember TheFacebook.com?
When TheFacebook launched on this day, Feb. 4, in 2004, it was for a limited audience and offered limited capabilities — and, the first time the site showed up in TIME, the writer had an appropriately limited amount to say about it.
The site’s first mention in TIME was later that year, in a story about online dating for the college set, in which Facebook’s founders insisted that their site didn’t belong in that group:
The operators of college dating sites sometimes don’t like to admit their sites are for dating, preferring to play up how they enhance student life in general. Chris Hughes, a rising junior at Harvard who helped start Thefacebook.com at his school earlier this year, says when his roommate Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea, it was to be “a directory of information for college students.” Offering Friendsteresque features, it allows students to network through friends and connect with people in their classes they would like to meet. The site now boasts 58 member colleges, including all of the Ivy League.
People are familiar with the DOD research and development arm, DARPA.
In 2003-2004, DARPA collaborated with the Pentagon on a special program, LifeLog.
At the time, it was “an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.”
Wired reported that Pentagon killed the project;
THE PENTAGON CANCELED its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.
Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.
LifeLog’s backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians immediately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, arguing that LifeLog could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state.
Researchers close to the project say they’re not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn’t provided an explanation for LifeLog’s quiet cancellation. “A change in priorities” is the only rationale agency spokeswoman Jan Walker gave to Wired News.
However, related Darpa efforts concerning software secretaries and mechanical brains are still moving ahead as planned.
February 4, 2004. It was the day DARPA and the Pentagon terminated the LifeLog project.
What was the date that facebook.com went live at Harvard? See this:
It’s the exact same day, with a similar platform and mission. What’s Facebook?
If you know something about Harvard and its link to the intelligence community, you have to scratch your head and wonder if the clowns were on campus back in the early 2000s looking at ways to launder this project through a private entity.
What’s wrong about this thing is that over the past few couples of decades, we have freely given up this information so we could look fabulous on the net.
