On Thursday, Facebook announced that in the coming weeks it will stop using facial recognition, a technology introduced on the platform in 2010 that made it possible to identify faces in photos and videos and that had long been the focus of considerable controversy over its implications for the privacy of individuals. users. The artificial intelligence behind this technology made it possible, for example, to automatically suggest to those who published a photo to tag the people in the image.
The Facebook announcement comes at a time of great difficulty for the company, which has been subjected to severe criticism following the publication of the so-called “Facebook Papers” and various other inquiries that have damaged its reputation. The decision to eliminate facial recognition was therefore interpreted as an attempt to make concessions on the issue of privacy, one of the most controversial. This is a noteworthy concession, but still limited, because facial recognition is of rather little importance in Facebook's overall business.
In a post published on the blog of Meta – the new name of the company that controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – Jerome Pesenti, vice president of the division that deals with artificial intelligence within Facebook, said that the decision represents “one of the biggest changes. in the use of facial recognition in the history of technology “. In the coming weeks, people who have consented to the use of facial recognition will no longer receive suggestions on who to tag in photos and videos, and Facebook will delete data relating to more than a billion people identified using this technology from its database.
Facebook's facial recognition had aroused great criticism in the past mainly because, at least initially and in some areas of the world, the technology had been activated automatically, and it was users who had to act to deactivate it on their accounts. For this reason, an Illinois court last year accused Facebook of using facial recognition technologies without users' explicit consent, and forced it to pay $ 550 million in compensation. Today, according to Facebook, just over a third of users have this technology activated.
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Thursday's announcement is the first major change, after the name of the holding, since the so-called “Facebook Papers” were published, the internal documents disseminated to various American newspapers by the whistleblower and former employee of the company Frances Haugen: the documents showed, among other things, the failures of Facebook management to contain disinformation and incitement to hatred and violence on the platform, sometimes for lack of technical means, and sometimes for not damaging the profits derived from the '' activity of people on Facebook.
In his post Presenti he says there are many areas where facial recognition through artificial intelligence can be useful, but he also added that “there are many concerns about the role of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators they still have to provide clear rules governing their use “. Presenti said that in this situation of uncertainty in regulations, Facebook prefers to limit the use of facial recognition to a small number of cases: such as to gain access to a blocked account or to verify a person's identity.
Beyond Facebook, facial recognition systems are used in various fields and with controversial results, starting with that of urban security: several cities around the world use video surveillance systems capable of analyzing people's biometric data, and in the future they will also arrive in Italy.
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