Facebook is working on a new feature that would let users hide their faces from the site. The social media giant announced the project at its F8 conference on Wednesday. The feature, which is still in development, would let people choose to show only their profile pictures and cover images on Facebook. People who use the feature would also be able to control who can see their posts and pages. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company wants to make it easier for people to connect with friends and family without having to share personal information. He added that the company is also working on other privacy features, such as a tool that will allow people to control what data companies can collect about them. Zuckerberg’s comments come after Facebook was criticized for its handling of data privacy issues. In March, reports emerged that Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook data from millions of users without their consent. The company has since been fined by regulators in Europe and the United States for its role in the scandal. ..
“People who’ve opted in will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos, and we will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates,” Jerome Pesenti, VP of Artificial Intelligence, said in a Meta blog post.
The social media giant has offered an opt-in facial recognition tool since 2019, and it’s pretty incredible just from a functionality standpoint. Someone posts a picture with you in it, and Facebook notices that you’re there and suggests you tag yourself in it.
On the surface, it seems like a simple and convenient feature, but it means a single company has a detailed facial recognition database of much of the world’s population. Sure, Meta says it’s an opt-in feature, but that doesn’t change the fact that its a private entity with so much data.
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In the blog post, Pesenti said, “There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”
That sounds like Meta is worried about government regulation regarding facial recognition, and the company is taking a proactive approach by removing the data and not gathering new facial information.
Facebook settled a lawsuit in Illinois in February 2021 accusing Facebook’s tagging tech of violating Illinois’ biometric privacy law. It saw the company agree to pay $650 million for allegedly using face-tagging data without user permissions. This is just in one state, and there could easily be other states and countries that pass similar laws in the future.
“We are pleased to have reached a settlement so we can move past this matter, which is in the best interest of our community and our shareholders,” Facebook said in a statement.
Meta also cited the reminded us of the positives offered by facial recognition in the post. “For example, the ability to tell a blind or visually impaired user that the person in a photo on their News Feed is their high school friend, or former colleague, is a valuable feature that makes our platforms more accessible. But it also depends on an underlying technology that attempts to evaluate the faces in a photo to match them with those kept in a database of people who opted-in. The changes we’re announcing today involve a company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification, and toward narrower forms of personal authentication,” Pesenti said.
The change will also make it so the social network can no longer use Automatic Alt Text, a technology used to create image descriptions for blind or visually impaired people. Clearly, the company feels like this is worth the tradeoff, as it wouldn’t make a move like this without really weighing both sides.
While those sound like a practical use of the technology, the company believes that outside pressure and the privacy issues with a company having that much facial data isn’t worth the tradeoff.
What about Face ID on iPhone? Meta acknowledged the difference between on-device facial recognition and a database of faces. “Facial recognition can be particularly valuable when the technology operates privately on a person’s own devices. This method of on-device facial recognition, requiring no communication of face data with an external server, is most commonly deployed today in the systems used to unlock smartphones,” the blog post reads.
In the end, Meta looks to be getting ahead of regulation and is responding to a lawsuit. Paying a $650 million settlement to one state is unpleasant, but if future states and countries were to sue the company over the same matter, it could be catastrophic for it. While we’d love to believe that Meta just had a change of heart and decided to put the privacy of its users first, that doesn’t seem likely.
