17 ms·

Facebook is backing away from facial recognition. Meta isn’t

179 points by rpadovani 5y ago

namanaggarwal 5y ago
Works at Facebook, opinions are my own. I find this article highly speculative. Facebook or Meta has not said anything on future uses, but that's for a lot of other things. Company hasn't said anything about not making weapons in the future as well. In my opinion facial recognition technology has genuine uses, however from the privacy perspective, I personally would want all of these models to be running on my device. Google does it and so can other companies including Meta, and I find that completely fine as long as it's relevant to me and I have an option to turn it off.
- capableweb 5y ago
  They seem to have firsthand sources to support the articles title: > While Meta says that facial recognition isn’t a feature on Instagram and its Portal devices, the company’s new commitment doesn’t apply to its metaverse products, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse told Recode. Then further down, the article also links to other articles that goes deeper: > Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth told employees that the company is evaluating the legal and privacy issues around facial recognition for its upcoming wearable gadget. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-considers-facial-recognition-smart-glasses https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-consid... Not sure why you think it's speculative when it's based on Meta/Facebook employees own statements. By the way, thanks for leaving a comment here and being public about working at Facebook, can't be easy to receive so much hate, especially here on HN, but we all need everyone's perspective, so thanks a lot for providing it here!
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >Not sure why you think it's speculative when it's based on Meta/Facebook employees own statements. Too much koolaid? of course, that's just reverse speculation on my part.
- papito 5y ago
  Yourself as a Facebook employee, you should know first hand that your employer lies to their own workforce without flinching. The only thing I will trust Facebook with is when they report their earnings. The Facebook brand has become utterly toxic. Meta is a clean slate, but there is almost zero chance they will not load it up with toxins again. They have no incentives to be a good citizen.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    Hey man, let's stay friendly to our fellow HNers.
- notTheAuth 5y ago
  Xfinity provides internet while Comcast screws customers Trickle down is a euphemism for peeing on people from the top It’s all obfuscating semantic games to conceal their application of agency, not literally, but cognitively
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jdoliner 5y ago
Facebook: we're moving away from this ethically and morally reprehensible technology under their breath because the IP is better held in a different part of our corporate structure.
- tqi 5y ago
  Facial recognition is ethically and morally reprehensible technology?
  - peakaboo 5y ago
    No it's great to track and record every human around the clock and completely automated. That way, we make sure everyone stays in line and don't try to organize themselves to get rid of dictatorship.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      No no, it's for their safety. We can now watch as you get mugged at gunpoint while not doing anything about it. See, you're safer now that we've facially recognized and identified you getting mugged.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    The technology itself? No. The way it's used in the real world? By a wide margin of use, yes.
    - RNCTX 5y ago
      The answer is therefore "yes." In a sane world, there would be sane laws with stiff penalties (as in, jail). For instance, "any identifying data about individual users may only be used for authentication and shall be completely under the control of the user. 'Under control' means the user is allowed to delete it. Examples of activity not compatible with 'under control of the user' include training AI models. Illegal use of authentication data will represent a felony punishable by XYZ." And even then, if there is jail, it's not beyond a corporation to appoint a lesser VP to serve the jail time and just "take care of" him when he gets out. The American agricultural products company you would think it is + their American bank + some British banks did so years ago when they got caught trying to offset the cost of R&D farmland in Africa by leasing it out to those warlord / death squad types (and their arms dealers) who hand machetes, cocaine, and AK47s to 10 year olds.
nikk1 5y ago
Meta wants to capture your biometric data so that your facial expressions and body language can be mapped onto a 3D avatar in virtual reality. Is this really the future of the metaverse? or is it just what Mark Zuckerberg thinks what the metaverse should look like? I am a little skeptical of this vision. And I imagine most of the "metaverse" will be experienced through flat screens - and text, voice, and video will remain dominate. VR will grow but do we really need to map our physical expressions onto an avatar to play games or collaborate together? Why go through all this complexity when we can just have controls to enable our 3D avatars to emote? If you really want to convey facial expressions and a personable experience, just enable video.
- falcolas 5y ago
  > If you really want to convey facial expressions and a personable experience, just enable video. I hate to take Meta's side, but enabling video is inviting discrimination and hate speech. Enabling audio alone has proven to be enough to bring out the worst in people online. Voice mixers and avatars will result in a much more even experience for everyone involved. Emoting through an avatar will make that experience richer. You can (literally) be a dog online if you want.
  - nikk1 5y ago
    > Enabling audio alone has proven to be enough to bring out the worst in people online. I am not sure if the issue stems from enabling audio. We see this over text on facebook, reddit, and pretty much every gaming platform.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Enabling audio makes it easy to find a target based on their inherit characteristics. The bar is low to find, for example, a woman to harass in a videogame over voice comms (an exceedingly common problem). FB, Reddit, et.al. require the target to actually exhibit a belief or opinion to become a target. It ironically raises the bar for being an asshole to a specific target when you can't hear them.
peakaboo 5y ago
If you guys aren't born yesterday, you have realized by now that it's a step by step process. If too much resistence, back away for a few months, then implement it again. The wheel goes round and round. Tech is building our 1984 or brave new world society and there is nothing to be done about it.
aserdf 5y ago
am curious - what will meta do with shadow profiles? does your shadow-meta just sit idly in the middle of some public space for eternity? do you get vandalized/ridiculed? can your shadow-meta be identified by others? will it use the previous facial recognition data to guide how you look?
- dylan604 5y ago
  have they actually admitted to having these shadow profiles? "what do you want us to do with these things you say we have that we totally do not have pinky swear"
mupuff1234 5y ago
But they'll still continue to use internally for data mining, knowledge graph, etc - which is really the main problem.
- papito 5y ago
  If there is no law against it, who is going to stop them, and why would they care?
  - mupuff1234 5y ago
    What I'm trying to say is that they are in fact not backing away from facial recognition as the title suggests - unless they will stop using it internally as well.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  citation? Seems like the opposite of what they're saying.
  - mupuff1234 5y ago
    From what I read I only saw them talking about the photo tagging feature more or less - I didn't see any references to usage in internal systems or research. I might be mistaken, but unless explicitly mentioned I will not give them the benefit of the doubt - we are way past that.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I've seen a genius use of face analysis lately: nvidia new video codec for chat. https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression Basically it creates an AI model of your face, send that to the other party, and then when you move, it only sends key face points. The other party uses the AI model to create a virtual hi-res picture of you, thispersondoesnotexist style, except it looks perfectly like you. Then it uses the face points to move it the way you move. The result: it consumes almost no bandwidth and you get the experience of a hi-res video call. Of course, then I realized the trap: it's a perfect honey pot to get everyone to scan their face. This is, IMO, what's going to happen with the VR. Big companies like Facebook/Meta are going to use the online avatar as a motivator to let them scan everything that can identify you. It will make the virtual you so realistic! Scan your face, your cat, your whole flat! People will jump on that, with no thinking about the consequences what so ever. After all, they are crazy about the way services like snapchat can change your face on a video. It's already game over. Like with Ken of the North star, we don't know it, but we are already owned.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Other advantages of the NVIDIA system is that it can "fix" things about your face in the reconstruction. It can synthesize eye contact, cover for you when you're looking at your phone, synthesize a little smirk at a bad joke even if you just rolled your eyes.
  - yreg 5y ago
    Since iOS 14 FaceTime can make you look like you are looking at the camera instead of the screen below it. Settings -> FaceTime -> Eye Contact
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    It's also going to normalized it. Removing imperfections will become the norm, the way photoshoping magazing covers is, with all the social consequences. In fact, people will confuse what the machine think we look like, with what we actually look like, and I'm bracing for the bias that it will create.
ajb 5y ago
"A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back." It seems a big assumption that a technology occupying "the periphery of our attention" is calm. A lot of apps/sites are starting to do this 'dot where you have something you need to process', and although they are less obnoxious than notifications and popups, they are still a third party deciding that I need to do something, and worse, they hang around with their 'you have left something undone' vibe until you click on them. This is not calming. Frankly I think 'use as little of my attention as possible' should be the major principle, not 'be polite in how you dispose of my attention'
Traster 5y ago
The thing that surprises me about the facial recognition news is that I was expecting it to be the other way around. For meta to outlaw it. The reason for the re-name is to separate Zuck and his new project from the toxic reputation that facebook has. So the logical thing to do is to get meta to outlaw facial recognition, as a first indication that it's going to do business differently from how facebook was operated. Instead this is really interesting. Zuck has 'moved' from facebook to meta, and apparently, plans to bring his complete lack of ethics along with him (or to put it generously, his ignorant view of the world). Could we see the next evolution in facebook to be a social media platform that the company has decided is the past- and therefore they can afford to run it more ethically and be more considered about their abuse of their users. Become the warm and fuzzy that some parts of microsoft have become. Meanwhile Zuck moves to the "metaverse" which is him and a few others desparately trying to carry out the exploitation he succeeded with in the heyday of Facebook? Or to put it another way - it would be genuinely surprising if Zuck has the self-awareness to realise that Facebook's brand can be rehabilitated but that his brand is what's poisoning it.
- yosito 5y ago
  > it would be genuinely surprising if Zuck has the self-awareness It would be a breakthrough for artificial intelligence / machine consciousness.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- thrashh 5y ago
  Maybe Zac is fully-aware. He just has different values, values I definitely don’t agree with, but it’s also his own opinion. I don’t see why anyone would expect Meta to be different. People’s core values don’t usually change over time.
mcintyre1994 5y ago
Something they talk about a lot on the Vergecast (weekly podcast from The Verge) is that the killer app for AR is identifying people in real life for you. I think that's probably true for a lot of people who have to have a lot of professional in-person interactions with a lot of different people - which importantly includes journalists. They semi-jokingly talk about how they'd forgive many misgivings about a product that could reliably do that. And Facebook seems to be in by far the best position to have the data to build that product, as long as they hang on to their facial recognition data set somewhere.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > they talk about a lot on the Vergecast (weekly podcast from The Verge) is that the killer app for AR is identifying people in real life for you. > I think that's probably true for a lot of people which importantly includes journalists. I am TERRIBLE with faces. Like confuse-my-uncle-with-my-father bad, and i really don't see this feature being great. Like, will i really look for a notification over everyones head telling me there name? Will i have to populate it from my contact book? Will contacts give me their photo?
- bryan_w 5y ago
  It seems like this is their plan, but they will be forced to do it all locally. They are deleting all their face templates so that people can't accuse them of doing it remotely.
garbagecoder 5y ago
>vox

179 points by rpadovani 5y ago

Works at Facebook, opinions are my own. I find this article highly speculative. Facebook or Meta has not said anything on future uses, but that's for a lot of other things. Company hasn't said anything about not making weapons in the future as well. In my opinion facial recognition technology has genuine uses, however from the privacy perspective, I personally would want all of these models to be running on my device. Google does it and so can other companies including Meta, and I find that completely fine as long as it's relevant to me and I have an option to turn it off.

capableweb 5y ago
They seem to have firsthand sources to support the articles title: > While Meta says that facial recognition isn’t a feature on Instagram and its Portal devices, the company’s new commitment doesn’t apply to its metaverse products, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse told Recode. Then further down, the article also links to other articles that goes deeper: > Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth told employees that the company is evaluating the legal and privacy issues around facial recognition for its upcoming wearable gadget. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-considers-facial-recognition-smart-glasses https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-consid... Not sure why you think it's speculative when it's based on Meta/Facebook employees own statements. By the way, thanks for leaving a comment here and being public about working at Facebook, can't be easy to receive so much hate, especially here on HN, but we all need everyone's perspective, so thanks a lot for providing it here!
- dylan604 5y ago
  >Not sure why you think it's speculative when it's based on Meta/Facebook employees own statements. Too much koolaid? of course, that's just reverse speculation on my part.
papito 5y ago
Yourself as a Facebook employee, you should know first hand that your employer lies to their own workforce without flinching. The only thing I will trust Facebook with is when they report their earnings. The Facebook brand has become utterly toxic. Meta is a clean slate, but there is almost zero chance they will not load it up with toxins again. They have no incentives to be a good citizen.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  Hey man, let's stay friendly to our fellow HNers.
notTheAuth 5y ago
Xfinity provides internet while Comcast screws customers Trickle down is a euphemism for peeing on people from the top It’s all obfuscating semantic games to conceal their application of agency, not literally, but cognitively
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jdoliner 5y ago

Facebook: we're moving away from this ethically and morally reprehensible technology under their breath because the IP is better held in a different part of our corporate structure.

tqi 5y ago
Facial recognition is ethically and morally reprehensible technology?
- peakaboo 5y ago
  No it's great to track and record every human around the clock and completely automated. That way, we make sure everyone stays in line and don't try to organize themselves to get rid of dictatorship.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    No no, it's for their safety. We can now watch as you get mugged at gunpoint while not doing anything about it. See, you're safer now that we've facially recognized and identified you getting mugged.
- falcolas 5y ago
  The technology itself? No. The way it's used in the real world? By a wide margin of use, yes.
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    The answer is therefore "yes." In a sane world, there would be sane laws with stiff penalties (as in, jail). For instance, "any identifying data about individual users may only be used for authentication and shall be completely under the control of the user. 'Under control' means the user is allowed to delete it. Examples of activity not compatible with 'under control of the user' include training AI models. Illegal use of authentication data will represent a felony punishable by XYZ." And even then, if there is jail, it's not beyond a corporation to appoint a lesser VP to serve the jail time and just "take care of" him when he gets out. The American agricultural products company you would think it is + their American bank + some British banks did so years ago when they got caught trying to offset the cost of R&D farmland in Africa by leasing it out to those warlord / death squad types (and their arms dealers) who hand machetes, cocaine, and AK47s to 10 year olds.

nikk1 5y ago

Meta wants to capture your biometric data so that your facial expressions and body language can be mapped onto a 3D avatar in virtual reality. Is this really the future of the metaverse? or is it just what Mark Zuckerberg thinks what the metaverse should look like? I am a little skeptical of this vision. And I imagine most of the "metaverse" will be experienced through flat screens - and text, voice, and video will remain dominate. VR will grow but do we really need to map our physical expressions onto an avatar to play games or collaborate together? Why go through all this complexity when we can just have controls to enable our 3D avatars to emote? If you really want to convey facial expressions and a personable experience, just enable video.

falcolas 5y ago
> If you really want to convey facial expressions and a personable experience, just enable video. I hate to take Meta's side, but enabling video is inviting discrimination and hate speech. Enabling audio alone has proven to be enough to bring out the worst in people online. Voice mixers and avatars will result in a much more even experience for everyone involved. Emoting through an avatar will make that experience richer. You can (literally) be a dog online if you want.
- nikk1 5y ago
  > Enabling audio alone has proven to be enough to bring out the worst in people online. I am not sure if the issue stems from enabling audio. We see this over text on facebook, reddit, and pretty much every gaming platform.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Enabling audio makes it easy to find a target based on their inherit characteristics. The bar is low to find, for example, a woman to harass in a videogame over voice comms (an exceedingly common problem). FB, Reddit, et.al. require the target to actually exhibit a belief or opinion to become a target. It ironically raises the bar for being an asshole to a specific target when you can't hear them.

peakaboo 5y ago

If you guys aren't born yesterday, you have realized by now that it's a step by step process. If too much resistence, back away for a few months, then implement it again. The wheel goes round and round. Tech is building our 1984 or brave new world society and there is nothing to be done about it.

aserdf 5y ago

am curious - what will meta do with shadow profiles? does your shadow-meta just sit idly in the middle of some public space for eternity? do you get vandalized/ridiculed? can your shadow-meta be identified by others? will it use the previous facial recognition data to guide how you look?

dylan604 5y ago
have they actually admitted to having these shadow profiles? "what do you want us to do with these things you say we have that we totally do not have pinky swear"

mupuff1234 5y ago

But they'll still continue to use internally for data mining, knowledge graph, etc - which is really the main problem.

papito 5y ago
If there is no law against it, who is going to stop them, and why would they care?
- mupuff1234 5y ago
  What I'm trying to say is that they are in fact not backing away from facial recognition as the title suggests - unless they will stop using it internally as well.
vineyardmike 5y ago
citation? Seems like the opposite of what they're saying.
- mupuff1234 5y ago
  From what I read I only saw them talking about the photo tagging feature more or less - I didn't see any references to usage in internal systems or research. I might be mistaken, but unless explicitly mentioned I will not give them the benefit of the doubt - we are way past that.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

I've seen a genius use of face analysis lately: nvidia new video codec for chat. https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression Basically it creates an AI model of your face, send that to the other party, and then when you move, it only sends key face points. The other party uses the AI model to create a virtual hi-res picture of you, thispersondoesnotexist style, except it looks perfectly like you. Then it uses the face points to move it the way you move. The result: it consumes almost no bandwidth and you get the experience of a hi-res video call. Of course, then I realized the trap: it's a perfect honey pot to get everyone to scan their face. This is, IMO, what's going to happen with the VR. Big companies like Facebook/Meta are going to use the online avatar as a motivator to let them scan everything that can identify you. It will make the virtual you so realistic! Scan your face, your cat, your whole flat! People will jump on that, with no thinking about the consequences what so ever. After all, they are crazy about the way services like snapchat can change your face on a video. It's already game over. Like with Ken of the North star, we don't know it, but we are already owned.

spoonjim 5y ago
Other advantages of the NVIDIA system is that it can "fix" things about your face in the reconstruction. It can synthesize eye contact, cover for you when you're looking at your phone, synthesize a little smirk at a bad joke even if you just rolled your eyes.
- yreg 5y ago
  Since iOS 14 FaceTime can make you look like you are looking at the camera instead of the screen below it. Settings -> FaceTime -> Eye Contact
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  It's also going to normalized it. Removing imperfections will become the norm, the way photoshoping magazing covers is, with all the social consequences. In fact, people will confuse what the machine think we look like, with what we actually look like, and I'm bracing for the bias that it will create.

ajb 5y ago

"A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back." It seems a big assumption that a technology occupying "the periphery of our attention" is calm. A lot of apps/sites are starting to do this 'dot where you have something you need to process', and although they are less obnoxious than notifications and popups, they are still a third party deciding that I need to do something, and worse, they hang around with their 'you have left something undone' vibe until you click on them. This is not calming. Frankly I think 'use as little of my attention as possible' should be the major principle, not 'be polite in how you dispose of my attention'

Traster 5y ago

The thing that surprises me about the facial recognition news is that I was expecting it to be the other way around. For meta to outlaw it. The reason for the re-name is to separate Zuck and his new project from the toxic reputation that facebook has. So the logical thing to do is to get meta to outlaw facial recognition, as a first indication that it's going to do business differently from how facebook was operated. Instead this is really interesting. Zuck has 'moved' from facebook to meta, and apparently, plans to bring his complete lack of ethics along with him (or to put it generously, his ignorant view of the world). Could we see the next evolution in facebook to be a social media platform that the company has decided is the past- and therefore they can afford to run it more ethically and be more considered about their abuse of their users. Become the warm and fuzzy that some parts of microsoft have become. Meanwhile Zuck moves to the "metaverse" which is him and a few others desparately trying to carry out the exploitation he succeeded with in the heyday of Facebook? Or to put it another way - it would be genuinely surprising if Zuck has the self-awareness to realise that Facebook's brand can be rehabilitated but that his brand is what's poisoning it.

yosito 5y ago
> it would be genuinely surprising if Zuck has the self-awareness It would be a breakthrough for artificial intelligence / machine consciousness.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
thrashh 5y ago
Maybe Zac is fully-aware. He just has different values, values I definitely don’t agree with, but it’s also his own opinion. I don’t see why anyone would expect Meta to be different. People’s core values don’t usually change over time.

mcintyre1994 5y ago

Something they talk about a lot on the Vergecast (weekly podcast from The Verge) is that the killer app for AR is identifying people in real life for you. I think that's probably true for a lot of people who have to have a lot of professional in-person interactions with a lot of different people - which importantly includes journalists. They semi-jokingly talk about how they'd forgive many misgivings about a product that could reliably do that. And Facebook seems to be in by far the best position to have the data to build that product, as long as they hang on to their facial recognition data set somewhere.

vineyardmike 5y ago
> they talk about a lot on the Vergecast (weekly podcast from The Verge) is that the killer app for AR is identifying people in real life for you. > I think that's probably true for a lot of people which importantly includes journalists. I am TERRIBLE with faces. Like confuse-my-uncle-with-my-father bad, and i really don't see this feature being great. Like, will i really look for a notification over everyones head telling me there name? Will i have to populate it from my contact book? Will contacts give me their photo?
bryan_w 5y ago
It seems like this is their plan, but they will be forced to do it all locally. They are deleting all their face templates so that people can't accuse them of doing it remotely.

garbagecoder 5y ago

>vox