In the demanding time of the digital age, companies are continuing to improve their services to get along with what society needs. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name of its social media platform Facebook to ‘META’ last October 28, 2021. Mark Zuckerberg’s effort to move from a social media firm to a “metaverse” has resulted in rebranding. Meta announced later this week that it will end its use of facial recognition technology in the upcoming weeks. In this case, Face Recognition will be no longer available. This leads to deleting 1 Billion “Faceprints”, that are used for photo tagging. Is it part of a new beginning? or is it just part of the company’s advertising?
How does facebook Face Recognition work? and why Facebook had to stop it.
When people agreed to permit the use of facial recognition, Facebook scanned their faceprint and used it to find photographs and videos of them on the platform, with the option of tagging them. Moreover, it is used to determine if someone else was imitating that Facebook user. This also helps visually impaired people by identifying who was in a photo.
Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti said Facial recognition technology is a useful tool to verify identity, It requires strong privacy and transparency authority to allow people to limit how their faces are used. He also added that there were a lot of concerns regarding the place of facial recognition technology in the public, with regulators still taking part. “In this ongoing uncertainty, we feel it is appropriate to limit the use of facial recognition to a small set of use cases properly,” he said. Presenti added that facial recognition is beneficial when like Facebook technology, It works only on a person’s device. For example, unlocking the iPhone and not making contact with an external server.
Worry no more because the spokesperson said that Meta has faith that there are tons of potentially positive use cases for facial recognition in the coming years. and It is something the company is working on, but privacy, control, and transparency will always be on the mind. Meta is focusing on creating the metaverse and making an effort to explore new things at the same instant as it is at odds with a progressively negative public image in the past few months.
