The social media giant just announced it will not be using facial recognition programs to identify faces in photos and videos.
The use of facial recognition technologies have raised many concerns in recent times. People are questioning its accuracy, racial biasness among serious issues of privacy and ethics.
It is apparent regulators are having a hard time providing clear guidelines on the use of the technology.
Facebook is seriously being criticized over the use of the technology and the impact it is having on its users.
So far, users can choose in or out on a feature that allows Facebook to scan their faces in pictures that are posted by other users. The company uses this to inform users who might have uploaded their image.
The vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook, Jerome Pesenti did say “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”
Forbes news have reported several cases where facial recognition apps wrongly identified people. A famous case was back in 2015 when Google’s software labeled a young black man and his friend as gorillas.
Although facial recognition programs continue to misidentify people, the tech is struggling to identify black people especially black women. A research conducted by the US government and another by the National Institute of Standards and Technology has proven this.
The legal battles tech companies are facing due to the use of facial recognition is deterring them from using the technology. Amazon and Microsoft are putting their facial recognition projects with US police on hold due to controversies surrounding the project.
Facebook’s acquisition of other social media companies like Instagram and WhatsApp, have brought the company under serious criticism and scrutiny.
To complicate issues, a former employee of Facebook – Frances Haugen released documents last month that shows Facebook is choosing profit over safety.
But in a swift response Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook says Ms Haugen’s expose is part of an agenda. An agenda to “paint a false picture”.
In the wake of all these issues, the company changed its name to Meta. A move critics say is a ploy by the company to distract the public from all the bad press the company is getting.
