14 ms·

Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition system

265 points by nycdatasci 5y ago

ajay-b 5y ago
I’m happy but I don’t believe it.
wayoutthere 5y ago
Sorry for me not believing this. They’ve been caught lying so many times trying to save face that I fully expect them to double down on facial recognition after this announcement.
jMyles 5y ago
They're not going to shut it down. They're just doing to deny access to you and me, and sell it to cops and despots.
rkagerer 5y ago
If it had been opt-in from the getgo, I think it would have been less controversial. I still remember a time when it was common courtesy to ask someone before you took a picture of them.
herunan 5y ago
This is all just PR. Doesn’t really affect revenue.
AuthorizedCust 5y ago
Serious question: I kind of liked how Facebook found people in my photos. Is there room for such a feature in a privacy conscious world?
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  Yes, there is. Instead of publicly auto-tagging you on the photo, FB could notify you that someone had uploaded a photo of you, and offer you to either: 1. Tag yourself on the photo 2. Censor yourself from the photo (blur, pixelate, black rectangle, whatever) Voilá, now the same feature is used to give control over your data.
  - bhhaskin 5y ago
    Here is an interesting question. Is it at that point your data? Wouldn't it be the data of who ever took the photo? Why would it belong to you just because you are in the photo? I think giving users power over auto tagging make sense. But giving users power over other people's photos is a terrible idea.
    - aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
      I think it’s basic courtesy to ask someone if they want their picture taken or not. This would only automate the process.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        That wouldn't be possible in many cases. True courtesy would be paying them.
- tmountain 5y ago
  Subjective answer: Any data that has the potential for abuse regarding privacy will eventually find its way to being abused. Providing said feature requires curating the dataset necessary to power it. How can we trust companies beholden to quarterly earnings to do the right thing when financial motivations inform 100% of their actions? We can't.
  - bdamm 5y ago
    Unless regulation is brought, they're going to do it anyway. The companies are absolutely going to be doing facial recognition and use that data, they just will be doing it without exposing the use of it to us.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    > Any data that has the potential for abuse regarding privacy will eventually find its way to being abused. Right, and it is our duty to not just roll over and let it be abused. We live in the world we create. Just shrugging will guarantee it will be abused.
- snarf21 5y ago
  You need to ask the other question: Do they like it when HB tags them in yours and everyone else's photos?
  - bryan_w 5y ago
    I mean, they opted in (it's off by default) so I would think so.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- uuddlrlr 5y ago
  iOS does this on-device, you can access the SQLite database containing the metadata using libimobiledevice's ifuse(1). https://libimobiledevice.org/ https://libimobiledevice.org/
- ryandrake 5y ago
  The privacy cat is already out of the bag once someone uploads a photo of you without your consent. That's the root behavior that should be corrected, and it's hard because the onus is on the privacy-conscious user, to get everyone else's cooperation. The facial recognition just adds even more privacy-questionable metadata. My dream facial recognition feature for Facebook would be to allow me, as a non-user of Facebook, to upload some hash of my face and direct Facebook to disallow any user from uploading a picture with my face in it.
  - 8note 5y ago
    the privacy has been broken once you've been photographed without your consent. The same features for name association can be done offline once the picture exists. Just show people the picture, and see if anyone knows who it is
    - mechanical_bear 5y ago
      Consent is not required in a public setting.
  - MrKristopher 5y ago
    Is facial recognition so good that it can distinguish you from a billion other people? I assumed the photo recognition relied on the social graph i.e. to look for your friends or friends of friends in your pictures.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    That's kind of a radical position. People shouldn't take photos of crowds in public places? You want veto power over that?
    - Vrondi 5y ago
      In the USA at least, there is no legal expectation of privacy on a public street. So, for news reporting purposes, you can publish photos of a crowd in public. However, as soon as you step onto private property, this changes. Even at places like shopping malls and stores, the owner of that place can take your photo for security, but cannot publish it, and it is not kosher for photographers to take photos of customers in these settings and publish them without getting a signed model release form the subject of the photo. Likewise, a photographer should get explicit permission for any other private spaces such as homes.
- Vrondi 5y ago
  Well, honestly, you shouldn't be giving other peoples' likenesses to big corporations under worldwide non-exclusive license agreements without a signed model release consent form. However, enforcing this is almost impossible. But really, morally, you should never give anyone else's face to a corporation without their explicitly requesting you to upload the photo to a site.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Yes, if you do it client side. I could see this working as a browser plug in.
jcun4128 5y ago
Insert meme of History Channel Aliens guy (is such a thing possible)
xupybd 5y ago
They are finally realizing that they're scaring people away.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
  ..after the Horse has bolted!
- laurent92 5y ago
  2021 is the “let’s bring back normal stuff” year, after Apple restored USB, HDMI, Magsafe ports and the F1 keys ;) What next, moving back from the Cloud, data ownership, Youtube having chronological ordering instead of “We chose what you should watch because we want to influence your political opinions” ???
  - simion314 5y ago
    >Youtube having chronological ordering I am confused, for me the subscription section is always chronological and has everything I subscribed , I see the youtube home page a few times a year because I bookmarked the subscription url and not the home page. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
  - Yhippa 5y ago
    Make Blogs Great Again
tablespoon 5y ago
> The change affects more than a third of Facebook’s daily users who had facial recognition turned on for their accounts, according to the company. I'm surprise the number is that low. Wasn't enabling this a default? > That meant they received alerts when new photos or videos of them were uploaded to the social network. The feature had also been used to flag accounts that might be impersonating someone else... That's actually a pretty valuable and legitimate use case for such a system, even from a very pro-privacy perspective. > Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features, by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system, which is an advanced algorithm called DeepFace. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products, Mr. Grosse said. It's also almost certainly not going to delete the face-specific image tagging either, which means they could re-derive everything they're "deleting" relatively easily.
- drusepth 5y ago
  >I'm surprise the number is that low. Wasn't enabling this a default? The first implementation appeared in 2017 [1] as tag suggestions, but the facial recognition feature we know today evolved around 2019, when it was made opt-in rather than a default setting. [2] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16794660/facebook-facial-recognition-tagging-photos https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16794660/facebook-facial... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847650/facebook-facial-recognition-setting-default-opt-in https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847650/facebook-facial-r...
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Why does the NYT OP suggests Dec 2010? > 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’...
    - drusepth 5y ago
      I actually have NYT blocked because their reporting has had such shoddy research lately, but I guess they're probably referring to the face-clustering feature for tags where, when you upload an album, they'll cluster all the like-faces to you to let you tag all of them at once [1]. It was released in December 2010 and, AFAIK, is technically only face detection (they didn't suggest whose face it might be for many years), not facial recognition. (They bought facial recognition company Face.com in 2012 and everyone was excited that FB might finally get real recognition). I guess it could be argued that their implementation of face detection ultimately evolved into their current facial recognition systems (see: Ship of Theseus?), or that to a layperson the two technologies might (unfortunately) sound like the same thing. Or maybe I'm just being pedantic; I was just trying to add some historical context to the current, opt-in "facial recognition" feature in my comment above. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/facebook-will-start-using-facial-recognition-next-week/68121/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/faceb...
vvG94KbDUtRa 5y ago
Yet another useful technology going away because the activist media threw a five year temper tantrum over Trump being elected (which was mostly their fault in the first place)
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - bryan_w 5y ago
    I don't know about this one @dang. Respectfully I took a look at his comment history, and while they have some "spicy" comments, it doesn't seem to be for trolling purposes. I won't disagree that perhaps he broke the rules with the comment and it could be rephrased better, but it does seem like he is a real poster with a legitimate (although unpopular) viewpoint and could use a bit of grace, eh?
    - dang 5y ago
      Not just with that one comment. It's easy enough to get unbanned.
  - vvG94KbDUtRa 5y ago
    wait am I banned?
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  This is a corporate decision based on cold profit projections, and it affects FB users worldwide. Your local politics have little to do with that. This is about washing FB's image.
kome 5y ago
a step in the right direction. that said, i closed my facebook in 2008 and i never missed it.
mminer237 5y ago
I get all the privacy concerns, but this was actually super useful for people who opted-in. Manually retyping everybody's name when tagging them in 50 photos from an event is torturous.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  Yes, but why tag people?
  - mminer237 5y ago
    So they can see themselves in photos? So you don't have to look through all of your friends' photos to find which ones you are in and repost them yourself.
    - croes 5y ago
      Isn't it possible to tag people even if they don't have a FB account?
      - mminer237 5y ago
        You can type whatever you want as a tag, although I've never actually seen someone do this. I guess it could just be used to annotate images, or to recall who's who for your own use, a la how people used to write everyone's names on the back of photos.
- paxys 5y ago
  Who opted in? I certainly don't remember ever doing it, yet auto tagging has always worked for me (both when I am tagging pictures and when others are tagging me).
  - drusepth 5y ago
    The opt-in is at https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec -- I definitely remember intentionally opting in when it was added, and it's off on some of my throwaway accounts so I assume it wasn't auto-checked for everyone at some point.
literallyaduck 5y ago
"We are never ever ever getting back together." Facebook user base quoting 21 century poet laureate. Hey you remember all those times we analyzed you photos, and those times we did things we said we wouldn't? We totally aren't going to do those now. We are "Meta" not the evil Facebook, trust us. "Meta" has never lied to you, right?
ddoolin 5y ago
Slightly off-topic but I deleted my Instagram yesterday. I was really holding out for one person who almost refuses to talk to me on any non-FB property but...oh well. I'm glad to be rid of it, but I can't shake that it's somewhat meaningless and I'll miss the many content creators I followed who have earned my business. I wonder if there's some way to follow them in a way not tied to my identity.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  There are several Facebook and Twitter proxies; perhaps there's an Instagram proxy with an RSS feed?
  - mirkules 5y ago
    What do you mean by FB/Twitter proxies? Is it what it sounds like, service to access FB/Twitter in some kind of anonymous mode? And could you name a few?
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Yes. There's https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/ for Twitter. Can't remember the Facebook one, or the other Twitter one. There's also https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/ (and another one) for Reddit.
  - benrapscallion 5y ago
    There are: just Google “instagram bridge”. I use one of them - a bit slow but fine otherwise.
- seoulmetro 5y ago
  Create a new Instagram account and follow them? Instagram is anonymous.
neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20211102170829/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/technology/facebook-facial-recognition.html http://web.archive.org/web/20211102170829/https://www.nytime... https://archive.md/PLSTN https://archive.md/PLSTN
dang 5y ago
Their announcement is at https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-recognition/ https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-reco.... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29084199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29084199, but we merged that thread hither)
zbowling 5y ago
The facial recognition feature is how I figured out someone was doxxing and harassing me on their page. Getting the notification that it thinks I appeared in a photo they had ripped from my FB profile was the tip off. I have mixed feelings.
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
  HN is bizarre sometimes. When this feature first appeared, everyone acted like it was the coming of the Antichrist. Now it’s going away and people have “mixed feelings”. I think people just love to hate big tech no matter what they’re doing.
  - jonas21 5y ago
    Or... maybe HN is composed of different people with different viewpoints. People are more motivated to comment when they're upset about something, so it ends up looking like everyone here hates everything big tech does, when it may be that a small number of people hate decision X, a small number of people hate decision Y, and most people either like them or don't care. You often hear complaints that big tech drives people to extreme viewpoints through algorithms. But the natural human algorithm of putting more effort into the negative than the positive seems to lead to the same outcome.
    - cecilpl2 5y ago
      This is also why it's much more valuable to look at user metrics than actual feedback when making design decisions. Individual pieces of feedback can be valuable, but if you let it do the driving then you can end up making changes that worsen your product. You become subject to the will of the most vocal critics at any given moment.
      - Karunamon 5y ago
        Be careful with this advice, though. Writing off feedback, as Mozilla does, can blow up in your face as you dismiss any and all criticism as being from a vocal minority of whiners.
renewiltord 5y ago
Pity. I liked the feature. Fortunately, we’ve mostly all moved over to use Google’s shared albums with automatic facial recognition and sharing. My friends all have photos I take of them and likewise they share theirs with me. I think Google has figured out a lot of fun sharing tools for people in trusted environments: location sharing, photo tagging, etc. I’m rather impressed with it all. Good stuff.
- bduerst 5y ago
  Same, though Google doesn't enable it for users in different countries. It's weird to be able to automatically share photos with a partner with face recognition, but then they can't reciprocate for some reason.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
Who needs facial recognition when we're going to be uploading our minds into the metaverse?
bryan_w 5y ago
The hoops they have to jump through just to enable some really cool features down the line is sad. I don't know why adding another opt in wasn't enough, it's not like the haters are going to believe they deleted the templates anyways.
- mechanical_bear 5y ago
  “Haters” ok. I feel like that is just a cheap deflection from legitimate criticism.
quotemstr 5y ago
Luddites. You can't un-invent technology. Like all technology, facial recognition has tremendous potential for good. We should learn to live with the technology, not attempt to forbid its use. Also, Meta is a bunch of cowards nowadays. They should not have kowtowed to angry Twitter activists. It sets a bad precedent. I don't like this system where activists bully big companies into compliance with their idiosyncratic moral systems instead of using the government and the laws to codify restrictions and rules in a transparent way that everyone can understand and in which everyone has a say. If facial recognition is so bad, it should be illegal. If it's not illegal, FB has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize profit within the law. If, as an activist, can't get support for making facial recognition illegal, then maybe it's not quite as bad as you claim.
- TillE 5y ago
  "activists bully big companies" What's up with this plainly ridiculous usage of the term "bully"? It's almost self-parody. It's something I've noticed in British newspapers sometimes where MPs will whine about being "bullied" by citizens who post rude comments online. It's really obviously not the right term for whatever point you want to express! Taking points off your English paper for incorrect word usage.
- dspillett 5y ago
  > Also, cowards. I don't like this system where activists Are you sure it isn't just that not enough people opted in for it to be worth the cost of maintaining that part of the service? > FB has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize profit within the law Which it may be doing here, by removing infrastructure and people from running and maintaining a feature, resources that can then be used on features that have a better effect on the bottom line. Or are you believing that it is entirely about “finding balance” morally (or at least in the court of public opinion), rather than balancing the bottom line financially (even if just in part)?
asdff 5y ago
Why would they? I bet most users actually like that facebook finds their face in friends photos.
- paxys 5y ago
  I bet Facebook has a much better idea of what most of their users like or dislike.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Its probably because Facebook finally realized when government etc ask for data they need to give them otherwise you know ....... Also this is also good opportunity to green wash. It doesn't make a single dent on their ad revenue so why even gather more hate by doing some futile task?
slownews45 5y ago
It's always confusing to see what the internet police go after. Total scams ripping thousands to hundreds of thousands off from people (tech support scams etc). Crickets. An opt in feature on the facebook platform that is useful (at least to some). Multiple Attorney General press conferences :)
- jcun4128 5y ago
  There's Jim Browning for that
- croes 5y ago
  The negative impact of facial recognition technology is much bigger than the impact of scams.
  - fvdessen 5y ago
    Could you be more specific ?
- Vrondi 5y ago
  But their facial recognition is not opt-in. You cannot prevent other people from uploading photos of you then tagging your face in them, training Facebook's facial recognition to your face even if you consciously never upload your image a single time.
  - donatj 5y ago
    If you don't like that, you're going to hate this. https://youtu.be/KT18KJouHWg https://youtu.be/KT18KJouHWg Basically they can find you from your DNA, even if only a couple very distant relatives ever gave theirs.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    I get what you're saying but that's unguided learning though. Facebook doesn't have any way of linking that face fingerprint to you to even check your consent - but a part of me doubts that when they do make the link they remove the fingerprint bc you didn't opt in.
mkl95 5y ago
> We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules. Disclaimer: I have never owned an Apple product, and I haven't used Facebook for roughly a decade. Apple have been doing face recognition for a while now, arguably at a similar scale, but their use case is pretty straightforward. With FB face recognition is not the real concern, it's the fact they have been caught misusing personal data multiple times.
- htormey 5y ago
  Sadly apple are not angels either when it comes to scanning photos: https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-to-delay-implementing-anti-child-porn-system-for-iphones https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-to-delay-implementing-anti-...
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Where does apple do it? They do it in iPhoto but it is based on what you tell it, and is opt out. Where else?
  - mkl95 5y ago
    I only know about FaceID.
    - Vrondi 5y ago
      Unlike Facebook's facial recognition, other people can't enroll you into Apple's Face ID without your consent or knowledge.
    - bGl2YW5j 5y ago
      Face ID data is stored in an encrypted section of the iPhone's hardware and not transmitted: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208108 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208108 https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/security/sec59b0b31ff/web https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/security/sec59b0b31ff/...
antegamisou 5y ago
A legitimate question I’ve always had when we read such announcements is how can we be certain they’re actually doing whatever they’re claiming / planning to do. Unlike software /OS modifications, it’s not feasible to somehow reverse engineer FB’s backend and find out if anything unusual is happening. At least without any attempt of compromising it. Considering how powerful these orgs are, with low probability of facing any legal repercussions about potentially false claims, do we have any other option than to take their word for it?
- LadyCailin 5y ago
  The same way that you verify that the local chicken plant is properly following contamination prevention procedures. You don’t, at least not personally. We as a society rely on government based regulations and knowledgeable inspectors to verify these things. I’d say software should be no different in these regards. (Though that isn’t currently the case.)
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Reminds me of the drone photographers that were flying over pig farms in the south that were egregiously breaking laws. Instead of fixing the pig farms, they went after the photographers.
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      Authoritarian dysfunction. Killing the messenger.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Nowadays there's enough dissent inside FB itself (according to news articles), that if they lied about this, someone from the inside will probably leak/whistleblow about it...
  - f7f8rurjfi 5y ago
    What's it like being able to hold 2k karma despite being racist?
trident5000 5y ago
How about Match Group?
captainmuon 5y ago
So sad that we can't have nice things. I like the feature that automatically tags people in pictures. Sometimes I have trouble remembering people's names (not face blindness or similar, just regular trouble I guess). I would love to have smart glasses that show the name of someone I've met before but don't quite remember. But alas, our society being what it is people will abuse facial recognition, so I can't have that it seems...
- amelius 5y ago
  > So sad that we can't have nice things. Privacy is also a nice thing.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I didn't like that feature, and neither did my circle, back when I was on Facebook. We found it unnerving. But we are older and perhaps prefer the illusion of privacy, and not anyone being able to out us by uploading a picture and being archived/cataloged non-consensually.
- SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago
  The question is are you ok with some stranger adding a picture of you on facebook and then facebook promptly tags you on their profile.
  - kapp_in_life 5y ago
    Knowing that someone I don't know uploaded a photo of me seems like a good feature, yes.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      But now everyone else knows, too. That's not such a great feature.
      - bigzyg33k 5y ago
        But that isn’t how the feature worked
gip 5y ago
Also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/02/facebook-ends-facial-recognition/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/02/faceboo... https://archive.md/JMwS2 https://archive.md/JMwS2
sharkweek 5y ago
Here's where Facebook's brand reputation sits in my mind today: I do not believe them at all. I do not believe they've had some change of heart regarding "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." I do not believe they intend to not use this technology in some other privacy-invading way. Trying to figure out their real angle here. Avoid regulation? "Good" PR at a time when they desperately need it? A broader existential threat that I can't even fathom at the level of power their company currently wields in society? Probably not much at this point they could do to change my absolute negative opinion of the company though, so there's that.
- ben_jones 5y ago
  The system no longer provides FB the same value it previously did. So they're taking it down, now that they've collected billions of images. Will they be deleting the trained models too? All artifacts and inferences? Hell no.
  - Yhippa 5y ago
    They have then politicized it by referring to "regulators" and "regulations" several times.
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    "the social network will delete the face scan data of more than one billion users." I believe it because facebook has nothing much to gain by lying about this small thing(after all they still have all the tracking data) and hell lot to loose by lying this straight face among employees.
    - badRNG 5y ago
      > and hell lot to loose by lying this straight face among employees. And if, in a year an employee speaks out and leaks that FB never deleted the data? What would happen then? I don't think anything would happen, they wouldn't lose much, and no one would be too surprised.
pmlnr 5y ago
"I don't believe you" https://c.tenor.com/9PqKT8E9RNkAAAAd/gif.gif https://c.tenor.com/9PqKT8E9RNkAAAAd/gif.gif
tehjoker 5y ago
I am for this decision, but I don't understand their justification for it. What was the actual reason they pulled back on this? The US government is assuredly for maximum surveillance, so long as the publicly visible part is done by private companies that can be subpoenaed for their data. FB needs to stay in the good graces of the military-industrial-political complex to avoid anti-trust action. FB doesn't do anything out of the good of their heart, so what are they getting out of this? I really doubt that winning the hearts of civil libertarians is at all important to them. (I also noticed how the NYT managed to get a dig into the discredited China story when discussing a company that was surveilling billions of people worldwide using facial recognition technology.)
advisedwang 5y ago
It seems this is likely a result of the 2019 FTC Consent Order on Facebook [1]. Facebook has had to implement privacy processes which are monitored by a 3rd party who reports to a judge and facial recognition was one of the issues sparking the order. The consent agreement [2] has whole sections and rules specifically for facial recognition data. Likely a review program and criteria (approved by the monitor) were set up based on these rules, and when the tagging feature was pushed through this review it failed. Rather than risk the judge sanctioning them for failing to meet the order, they decided shut down the feature. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-imposes-5-billion-penalty-sweeping-new-privacy-restrictions https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-i... [2] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/c4365facebookmodifyingorder.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/c4365facebo...
- cbtacy 5y ago
  Thank you. Yes... this is almost certainly happening because of the intersection of the Illinois settlement, the current microscope FB (no, I will not refer to them as M*a) finds themselves under, and the Consent Order that they have almost certainly violated dozens if not hundreds of times in the last few years. They've done the risk assessment, and they're reducing the risk profile in order to decrease potential liabilities and penalties.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    > (no, I will not refer to them as M*a) Surely, if anything, that should be "M&a".
sam345 5y ago
Good riddance. Good choice by FB.
5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 5y ago
Highly unlikely that they will delete it. The info collected is too valuable for them to delete it. They may retain the hash or other unique identifiers even if they delete originals. They have shown again and again that they can't be trusted. trust, once lost, can never be regained.
EastOfTruth 5y ago
Its public facial recognition system? For some reason I doubt that they will stop using it for themselves.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
The govt uses facial recognition for unemployment benefits because of the fraud experienced.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Penis recognition software is more private and is definitely the future of Internet identity.
throwaway29303 5y ago
Getting rid of its facial recognition system is a good step, but lest people either forget or miss... Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features, by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system, which is an advanced algorithm called DeepFace. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products, Mr. Grosse said.
seoulmetro 5y ago
Facebook facial recognition never actually learnt how to differentiate my face from my relative's face. It was cool since I had no "tracking" for them to save.
hungrigekatze 5y ago
Meta has no plans to discontinue the use of facial recognition though: https://www.vox.com/recode/22761598/facebook-facial-recognition-meta https://www.vox.com/recode/22761598/facebook-facial-recognit... The story of how Facebook's facial recognition capabilities came to be is an interesting one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face.com I had no idea that Face.com's algorithm was/is able to ID ~97% of all faces 'in the wild'. Nor did I know that Face.com had opened its API to use by dozens (hundreds?) of companies back in 2007. I wouldn't doubt if there are knock-offs / clones / reverse-engineered versions of the original Face.com API floating around. API security and design - in 200x - wasn't what it is today.

265 points by nycdatasci 5y ago

I’m happy but I don’t believe it.

Sorry for me not believing this. They’ve been caught lying so many times trying to save face that I fully expect them to double down on facial recognition after this announcement.

jMyles 5y ago

They're not going to shut it down. They're just doing to deny access to you and me, and sell it to cops and despots.

rkagerer 5y ago

If it had been opt-in from the getgo, I think it would have been less controversial. I still remember a time when it was common courtesy to ask someone before you took a picture of them.

herunan 5y ago

This is all just PR. Doesn’t really affect revenue.

AuthorizedCust 5y ago

Serious question: I kind of liked how Facebook found people in my photos. Is there room for such a feature in a privacy conscious world?

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
Yes, there is. Instead of publicly auto-tagging you on the photo, FB could notify you that someone had uploaded a photo of you, and offer you to either: 1. Tag yourself on the photo 2. Censor yourself from the photo (blur, pixelate, black rectangle, whatever) Voilá, now the same feature is used to give control over your data.
- bhhaskin 5y ago
  Here is an interesting question. Is it at that point your data? Wouldn't it be the data of who ever took the photo? Why would it belong to you just because you are in the photo? I think giving users power over auto tagging make sense. But giving users power over other people's photos is a terrible idea.
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
    I think it’s basic courtesy to ask someone if they want their picture taken or not. This would only automate the process.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      That wouldn't be possible in many cases. True courtesy would be paying them.
tmountain 5y ago
Subjective answer: Any data that has the potential for abuse regarding privacy will eventually find its way to being abused. Providing said feature requires curating the dataset necessary to power it. How can we trust companies beholden to quarterly earnings to do the right thing when financial motivations inform 100% of their actions? We can't.
- bdamm 5y ago
  Unless regulation is brought, they're going to do it anyway. The companies are absolutely going to be doing facial recognition and use that data, they just will be doing it without exposing the use of it to us.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > Any data that has the potential for abuse regarding privacy will eventually find its way to being abused. Right, and it is our duty to not just roll over and let it be abused. We live in the world we create. Just shrugging will guarantee it will be abused.
snarf21 5y ago
You need to ask the other question: Do they like it when HB tags them in yours and everyone else's photos?
- bryan_w 5y ago
  I mean, they opted in (it's off by default) so I would think so.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
uuddlrlr 5y ago
iOS does this on-device, you can access the SQLite database containing the metadata using libimobiledevice's ifuse(1). https://libimobiledevice.org/ https://libimobiledevice.org/
ryandrake 5y ago
The privacy cat is already out of the bag once someone uploads a photo of you without your consent. That's the root behavior that should be corrected, and it's hard because the onus is on the privacy-conscious user, to get everyone else's cooperation. The facial recognition just adds even more privacy-questionable metadata. My dream facial recognition feature for Facebook would be to allow me, as a non-user of Facebook, to upload some hash of my face and direct Facebook to disallow any user from uploading a picture with my face in it.
- 8note 5y ago
  the privacy has been broken once you've been photographed without your consent. The same features for name association can be done offline once the picture exists. Just show people the picture, and see if anyone knows who it is
  - mechanical_bear 5y ago
    Consent is not required in a public setting.
- MrKristopher 5y ago
  Is facial recognition so good that it can distinguish you from a billion other people? I assumed the photo recognition relied on the social graph i.e. to look for your friends or friends of friends in your pictures.
- skybrian 5y ago
  That's kind of a radical position. People shouldn't take photos of crowds in public places? You want veto power over that?
  - Vrondi 5y ago
    In the USA at least, there is no legal expectation of privacy on a public street. So, for news reporting purposes, you can publish photos of a crowd in public. However, as soon as you step onto private property, this changes. Even at places like shopping malls and stores, the owner of that place can take your photo for security, but cannot publish it, and it is not kosher for photographers to take photos of customers in these settings and publish them without getting a signed model release form the subject of the photo. Likewise, a photographer should get explicit permission for any other private spaces such as homes.
Vrondi 5y ago
Well, honestly, you shouldn't be giving other peoples' likenesses to big corporations under worldwide non-exclusive license agreements without a signed model release consent form. However, enforcing this is almost impossible. But really, morally, you should never give anyone else's face to a corporation without their explicitly requesting you to upload the photo to a site.
jacquesm 5y ago
Yes, if you do it client side. I could see this working as a browser plug in.

jcun4128 5y ago

Insert meme of History Channel Aliens guy (is such a thing possible)

xupybd 5y ago

They are finally realizing that they're scaring people away.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago
..after the Horse has bolted!
laurent92 5y ago
2021 is the “let’s bring back normal stuff” year, after Apple restored USB, HDMI, Magsafe ports and the F1 keys ;) What next, moving back from the Cloud, data ownership, Youtube having chronological ordering instead of “We chose what you should watch because we want to influence your political opinions” ???
- simion314 5y ago
  >Youtube having chronological ordering I am confused, for me the subscription section is always chronological and has everything I subscribed , I see the youtube home page a few times a year because I bookmarked the subscription url and not the home page. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
- Yhippa 5y ago
  Make Blogs Great Again

tablespoon 5y ago

> The change affects more than a third of Facebook’s daily users who had facial recognition turned on for their accounts, according to the company. I'm surprise the number is that low. Wasn't enabling this a default? > That meant they received alerts when new photos or videos of them were uploaded to the social network. The feature had also been used to flag accounts that might be impersonating someone else... That's actually a pretty valuable and legitimate use case for such a system, even from a very pro-privacy perspective. > Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features, by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system, which is an advanced algorithm called DeepFace. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products, Mr. Grosse said. It's also almost certainly not going to delete the face-specific image tagging either, which means they could re-derive everything they're "deleting" relatively easily.

drusepth 5y ago
>I'm surprise the number is that low. Wasn't enabling this a default? The first implementation appeared in 2017 [1] as tag suggestions, but the facial recognition feature we know today evolved around 2019, when it was made opt-in rather than a default setting. [2] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16794660/facebook-facial-recognition-tagging-photos https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16794660/facebook-facial... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847650/facebook-facial-recognition-setting-default-opt-in https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/3/20847650/facebook-facial-r...
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Why does the NYT OP suggests Dec 2010? > 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’...
  - drusepth 5y ago
    I actually have NYT blocked because their reporting has had such shoddy research lately, but I guess they're probably referring to the face-clustering feature for tags where, when you upload an album, they'll cluster all the like-faces to you to let you tag all of them at once [1]. It was released in December 2010 and, AFAIK, is technically only face detection (they didn't suggest whose face it might be for many years), not facial recognition. (They bought facial recognition company Face.com in 2012 and everyone was excited that FB might finally get real recognition). I guess it could be argued that their implementation of face detection ultimately evolved into their current facial recognition systems (see: Ship of Theseus?), or that to a layperson the two technologies might (unfortunately) sound like the same thing. Or maybe I'm just being pedantic; I was just trying to add some historical context to the current, opt-in "facial recognition" feature in my comment above. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/facebook-will-start-using-facial-recognition-next-week/68121/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/faceb...

vvG94KbDUtRa 5y ago

Yet another useful technology going away because the activist media threw a five year temper tantrum over Trump being elected (which was mostly their fault in the first place)

dang 5y ago
We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- bryan_w 5y ago
  I don't know about this one @dang. Respectfully I took a look at his comment history, and while they have some "spicy" comments, it doesn't seem to be for trolling purposes. I won't disagree that perhaps he broke the rules with the comment and it could be rephrased better, but it does seem like he is a real poster with a legitimate (although unpopular) viewpoint and could use a bit of grace, eh?
  - dang 5y ago
    Not just with that one comment. It's easy enough to get unbanned.
- vvG94KbDUtRa 5y ago
  wait am I banned?
ASalazarMX 5y ago
This is a corporate decision based on cold profit projections, and it affects FB users worldwide. Your local politics have little to do with that. This is about washing FB's image.

kome 5y ago

a step in the right direction. that said, i closed my facebook in 2008 and i never missed it.

mminer237 5y ago

I get all the privacy concerns, but this was actually super useful for people who opted-in. Manually retyping everybody's name when tagging them in 50 photos from an event is torturous.

mathgladiator 5y ago
Yes, but why tag people?
- mminer237 5y ago
  So they can see themselves in photos? So you don't have to look through all of your friends' photos to find which ones you are in and repost them yourself.
  - croes 5y ago
    Isn't it possible to tag people even if they don't have a FB account?
    - mminer237 5y ago
      You can type whatever you want as a tag, although I've never actually seen someone do this. I guess it could just be used to annotate images, or to recall who's who for your own use, a la how people used to write everyone's names on the back of photos.
paxys 5y ago
Who opted in? I certainly don't remember ever doing it, yet auto tagging has always worked for me (both when I am tagging pictures and when others are tagging me).
- drusepth 5y ago
  The opt-in is at https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec -- I definitely remember intentionally opting in when it was added, and it's off on some of my throwaway accounts so I assume it wasn't auto-checked for everyone at some point.

literallyaduck 5y ago

"We are never ever ever getting back together." Facebook user base quoting 21 century poet laureate. Hey you remember all those times we analyzed you photos, and those times we did things we said we wouldn't? We totally aren't going to do those now. We are "Meta" not the evil Facebook, trust us. "Meta" has never lied to you, right?

ddoolin 5y ago

Slightly off-topic but I deleted my Instagram yesterday. I was really holding out for one person who almost refuses to talk to me on any non-FB property but...oh well. I'm glad to be rid of it, but I can't shake that it's somewhat meaningless and I'll miss the many content creators I followed who have earned my business. I wonder if there's some way to follow them in a way not tied to my identity.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
There are several Facebook and Twitter proxies; perhaps there's an Instagram proxy with an RSS feed?
- mirkules 5y ago
  What do you mean by FB/Twitter proxies? Is it what it sounds like, service to access FB/Twitter in some kind of anonymous mode? And could you name a few?
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Yes. There's https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/ for Twitter. Can't remember the Facebook one, or the other Twitter one. There's also https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/ (and another one) for Reddit.
- benrapscallion 5y ago
  There are: just Google “instagram bridge”. I use one of them - a bit slow but fine otherwise.
seoulmetro 5y ago
Create a new Instagram account and follow them? Instagram is anonymous.

neonate 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20211102170829/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/technology/facebook-facial-recognition.html http://web.archive.org/web/20211102170829/https://www.nytime... https://archive.md/PLSTN https://archive.md/PLSTN

dang 5y ago

Their announcement is at https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-recognition/ https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-reco.... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29084199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29084199, but we merged that thread hither)

zbowling 5y ago

The facial recognition feature is how I figured out someone was doxxing and harassing me on their page. Getting the notification that it thinks I appeared in a photo they had ripped from my FB profile was the tip off. I have mixed feelings.

IAmGraydon 5y ago
HN is bizarre sometimes. When this feature first appeared, everyone acted like it was the coming of the Antichrist. Now it’s going away and people have “mixed feelings”. I think people just love to hate big tech no matter what they’re doing.
- jonas21 5y ago
  Or... maybe HN is composed of different people with different viewpoints. People are more motivated to comment when they're upset about something, so it ends up looking like everyone here hates everything big tech does, when it may be that a small number of people hate decision X, a small number of people hate decision Y, and most people either like them or don't care. You often hear complaints that big tech drives people to extreme viewpoints through algorithms. But the natural human algorithm of putting more effort into the negative than the positive seems to lead to the same outcome.
  - cecilpl2 5y ago
    This is also why it's much more valuable to look at user metrics than actual feedback when making design decisions. Individual pieces of feedback can be valuable, but if you let it do the driving then you can end up making changes that worsen your product. You become subject to the will of the most vocal critics at any given moment.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      Be careful with this advice, though. Writing off feedback, as Mozilla does, can blow up in your face as you dismiss any and all criticism as being from a vocal minority of whiners.

renewiltord 5y ago

Pity. I liked the feature. Fortunately, we’ve mostly all moved over to use Google’s shared albums with automatic facial recognition and sharing. My friends all have photos I take of them and likewise they share theirs with me. I think Google has figured out a lot of fun sharing tools for people in trusted environments: location sharing, photo tagging, etc. I’m rather impressed with it all. Good stuff.

bduerst 5y ago
Same, though Google doesn't enable it for users in different countries. It's weird to be able to automatically share photos with a partner with face recognition, but then they can't reciprocate for some reason.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

Who needs facial recognition when we're going to be uploading our minds into the metaverse?

bryan_w 5y ago

The hoops they have to jump through just to enable some really cool features down the line is sad. I don't know why adding another opt in wasn't enough, it's not like the haters are going to believe they deleted the templates anyways.

mechanical_bear 5y ago
“Haters” ok. I feel like that is just a cheap deflection from legitimate criticism.

quotemstr 5y ago

Luddites. You can't un-invent technology. Like all technology, facial recognition has tremendous potential for good. We should learn to live with the technology, not attempt to forbid its use. Also, Meta is a bunch of cowards nowadays. They should not have kowtowed to angry Twitter activists. It sets a bad precedent. I don't like this system where activists bully big companies into compliance with their idiosyncratic moral systems instead of using the government and the laws to codify restrictions and rules in a transparent way that everyone can understand and in which everyone has a say. If facial recognition is so bad, it should be illegal. If it's not illegal, FB has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize profit within the law. If, as an activist, can't get support for making facial recognition illegal, then maybe it's not quite as bad as you claim.

TillE 5y ago
"activists bully big companies" What's up with this plainly ridiculous usage of the term "bully"? It's almost self-parody. It's something I've noticed in British newspapers sometimes where MPs will whine about being "bullied" by citizens who post rude comments online. It's really obviously not the right term for whatever point you want to express! Taking points off your English paper for incorrect word usage.
dspillett 5y ago
> Also, cowards. I don't like this system where activists Are you sure it isn't just that not enough people opted in for it to be worth the cost of maintaining that part of the service? > FB has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize profit within the law Which it may be doing here, by removing infrastructure and people from running and maintaining a feature, resources that can then be used on features that have a better effect on the bottom line. Or are you believing that it is entirely about “finding balance” morally (or at least in the court of public opinion), rather than balancing the bottom line financially (even if just in part)?

asdff 5y ago

Why would they? I bet most users actually like that facebook finds their face in friends photos.

paxys 5y ago
I bet Facebook has a much better idea of what most of their users like or dislike.
cute_boi 5y ago
Its probably because Facebook finally realized when government etc ask for data they need to give them otherwise you know ....... Also this is also good opportunity to green wash. It doesn't make a single dent on their ad revenue so why even gather more hate by doing some futile task?

slownews45 5y ago

It's always confusing to see what the internet police go after. Total scams ripping thousands to hundreds of thousands off from people (tech support scams etc). Crickets. An opt in feature on the facebook platform that is useful (at least to some). Multiple Attorney General press conferences :)

jcun4128 5y ago
There's Jim Browning for that
croes 5y ago
The negative impact of facial recognition technology is much bigger than the impact of scams.
- fvdessen 5y ago
  Could you be more specific ?
Vrondi 5y ago
But their facial recognition is not opt-in. You cannot prevent other people from uploading photos of you then tagging your face in them, training Facebook's facial recognition to your face even if you consciously never upload your image a single time.
- donatj 5y ago
  If you don't like that, you're going to hate this. https://youtu.be/KT18KJouHWg https://youtu.be/KT18KJouHWg Basically they can find you from your DNA, even if only a couple very distant relatives ever gave theirs.
- bduerst 5y ago
  I get what you're saying but that's unguided learning though. Facebook doesn't have any way of linking that face fingerprint to you to even check your consent - but a part of me doubts that when they do make the link they remove the fingerprint bc you didn't opt in.

mkl95 5y ago

> We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules. Disclaimer: I have never owned an Apple product, and I haven't used Facebook for roughly a decade. Apple have been doing face recognition for a while now, arguably at a similar scale, but their use case is pretty straightforward. With FB face recognition is not the real concern, it's the fact they have been caught misusing personal data multiple times.

htormey 5y ago
Sadly apple are not angels either when it comes to scanning photos: https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-to-delay-implementing-anti-child-porn-system-for-iphones https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-to-delay-implementing-anti-...
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Where does apple do it? They do it in iPhoto but it is based on what you tell it, and is opt out. Where else?
- mkl95 5y ago
  I only know about FaceID.
  - Vrondi 5y ago
    Unlike Facebook's facial recognition, other people can't enroll you into Apple's Face ID without your consent or knowledge.
  - bGl2YW5j 5y ago
    Face ID data is stored in an encrypted section of the iPhone's hardware and not transmitted: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208108 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208108 https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/security/sec59b0b31ff/web https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/security/sec59b0b31ff/...

antegamisou 5y ago

A legitimate question I’ve always had when we read such announcements is how can we be certain they’re actually doing whatever they’re claiming / planning to do. Unlike software /OS modifications, it’s not feasible to somehow reverse engineer FB’s backend and find out if anything unusual is happening. At least without any attempt of compromising it. Considering how powerful these orgs are, with low probability of facing any legal repercussions about potentially false claims, do we have any other option than to take their word for it?

LadyCailin 5y ago
The same way that you verify that the local chicken plant is properly following contamination prevention procedures. You don’t, at least not personally. We as a society rely on government based regulations and knowledgeable inspectors to verify these things. I’d say software should be no different in these regards. (Though that isn’t currently the case.)
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Reminds me of the drone photographers that were flying over pig farms in the south that were egregiously breaking laws. Instead of fixing the pig farms, they went after the photographers.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Authoritarian dysfunction. Killing the messenger.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Nowadays there's enough dissent inside FB itself (according to news articles), that if they lied about this, someone from the inside will probably leak/whistleblow about it...
- f7f8rurjfi 5y ago
  What's it like being able to hold 2k karma despite being racist?

trident5000 5y ago

How about Match Group?

captainmuon 5y ago

So sad that we can't have nice things. I like the feature that automatically tags people in pictures. Sometimes I have trouble remembering people's names (not face blindness or similar, just regular trouble I guess). I would love to have smart glasses that show the name of someone I've met before but don't quite remember. But alas, our society being what it is people will abuse facial recognition, so I can't have that it seems...

amelius 5y ago
> So sad that we can't have nice things. Privacy is also a nice thing.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I didn't like that feature, and neither did my circle, back when I was on Facebook. We found it unnerving. But we are older and perhaps prefer the illusion of privacy, and not anyone being able to out us by uploading a picture and being archived/cataloged non-consensually.
SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago
The question is are you ok with some stranger adding a picture of you on facebook and then facebook promptly tags you on their profile.
- kapp_in_life 5y ago
  Knowing that someone I don't know uploaded a photo of me seems like a good feature, yes.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    But now everyone else knows, too. That's not such a great feature.
    - bigzyg33k 5y ago
      But that isn’t how the feature worked

gip 5y ago

Also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/02/facebook-ends-facial-recognition/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/02/faceboo... https://archive.md/JMwS2 https://archive.md/JMwS2

sharkweek 5y ago

Here's where Facebook's brand reputation sits in my mind today: I do not believe them at all. I do not believe they've had some change of heart regarding "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." I do not believe they intend to not use this technology in some other privacy-invading way. Trying to figure out their real angle here. Avoid regulation? "Good" PR at a time when they desperately need it? A broader existential threat that I can't even fathom at the level of power their company currently wields in society? Probably not much at this point they could do to change my absolute negative opinion of the company though, so there's that.

ben_jones 5y ago
The system no longer provides FB the same value it previously did. So they're taking it down, now that they've collected billions of images. Will they be deleting the trained models too? All artifacts and inferences? Hell no.
- Yhippa 5y ago
  They have then politicized it by referring to "regulators" and "regulations" several times.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  "the social network will delete the face scan data of more than one billion users." I believe it because facebook has nothing much to gain by lying about this small thing(after all they still have all the tracking data) and hell lot to loose by lying this straight face among employees.
  - badRNG 5y ago
    > and hell lot to loose by lying this straight face among employees. And if, in a year an employee speaks out and leaks that FB never deleted the data? What would happen then? I don't think anything would happen, they wouldn't lose much, and no one would be too surprised.

pmlnr 5y ago

"I don't believe you" https://c.tenor.com/9PqKT8E9RNkAAAAd/gif.gif https://c.tenor.com/9PqKT8E9RNkAAAAd/gif.gif

tehjoker 5y ago

I am for this decision, but I don't understand their justification for it. What was the actual reason they pulled back on this? The US government is assuredly for maximum surveillance, so long as the publicly visible part is done by private companies that can be subpoenaed for their data. FB needs to stay in the good graces of the military-industrial-political complex to avoid anti-trust action. FB doesn't do anything out of the good of their heart, so what are they getting out of this? I really doubt that winning the hearts of civil libertarians is at all important to them. (I also noticed how the NYT managed to get a dig into the discredited China story when discussing a company that was surveilling billions of people worldwide using facial recognition technology.)

advisedwang 5y ago

It seems this is likely a result of the 2019 FTC Consent Order on Facebook [1]. Facebook has had to implement privacy processes which are monitored by a 3rd party who reports to a judge and facial recognition was one of the issues sparking the order. The consent agreement [2] has whole sections and rules specifically for facial recognition data. Likely a review program and criteria (approved by the monitor) were set up based on these rules, and when the tagging feature was pushed through this review it failed. Rather than risk the judge sanctioning them for failing to meet the order, they decided shut down the feature. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-imposes-5-billion-penalty-sweeping-new-privacy-restrictions https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/07/ftc-i... [2] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/c4365facebookmodifyingorder.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/c4365facebo...

cbtacy 5y ago
Thank you. Yes... this is almost certainly happening because of the intersection of the Illinois settlement, the current microscope FB (no, I will not refer to them as M*a) finds themselves under, and the Consent Order that they have almost certainly violated dozens if not hundreds of times in the last few years. They've done the risk assessment, and they're reducing the risk profile in order to decrease potential liabilities and penalties.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > (no, I will not refer to them as M*a) Surely, if anything, that should be "M&a".

sam345 5y ago

Good riddance. Good choice by FB.

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN 5y ago

Highly unlikely that they will delete it. The info collected is too valuable for them to delete it. They may retain the hash or other unique identifiers even if they delete originals. They have shown again and again that they can't be trusted. trust, once lost, can never be regained.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

Its public facial recognition system? For some reason I doubt that they will stop using it for themselves.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

The govt uses facial recognition for unemployment benefits because of the fraud experienced.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Penis recognition software is more private and is definitely the future of Internet identity.

throwaway29303 5y ago

Getting rid of its facial recognition system is a good step, but lest people either forget or miss... Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features, by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system, which is an advanced algorithm called DeepFace. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products, Mr. Grosse said.

seoulmetro 5y ago

Facebook facial recognition never actually learnt how to differentiate my face from my relative's face. It was cool since I had no "tracking" for them to save.

hungrigekatze 5y ago

Meta has no plans to discontinue the use of facial recognition though: https://www.vox.com/recode/22761598/facebook-facial-recognition-meta https://www.vox.com/recode/22761598/facebook-facial-recognit... The story of how Facebook's facial recognition capabilities came to be is an interesting one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face.com I had no idea that Face.com's algorithm was/is able to ID ~97% of all faces 'in the wild'. Nor did I know that Face.com had opened its API to use by dozens (hundreds?) of companies back in 2007. I wouldn't doubt if there are knock-offs / clones / reverse-engineered versions of the original Face.com API floating around. API security and design - in 200x - wasn't what it is today.