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Facebook announced Tuesday that it plans to shut down its 10-year-old facial recognition system this month and remove facial scan data from more than 1 billion users as the use of the technology raises growing societal concerns.
Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook's new parent company Meta, said in a blog post on Tuesday: "This decision will be one of the biggest shifts in facial recognition technology in history." Shutting down the facial recognition system will result in the deletion of personal facial recognition information of more than 1 billion users. ”
Take one thing with another
Jerome Pescenti says they made the change because facial recognition technology has raised growing concerns. He added that the company still sees facial recognition as a powerful tool, but "every new technology has two sides, and we want to find the right balance." ”
Pescenti said these changes could have a negative impact on the visually impaired population. "Being able to tell blind or visually impaired users that photos have their high school friends or former co-workers is valuable, and they're also able to access social media more easily."
Automatic alt text (aat) is facebook's image description technology created for visually impaired and blind users. While aat will still be able to recognize the number of people in a photo, it will no longer use facial recognition to identify everyone in a photo.
But Facebook will still use facial recognition on a small scale, where users can unlock their locked accounts or verify their identity when using its financial products. He said regulators are still working out a clear set of rules to regulate the technology, and at a time when there is still uncertainty in the process, the company thinks it is appropriate to limit the use of facial recognition to a small range of use cases.
In addition, Facebook's parent company, Meta, appears to be working on new forms of identifying users. Pescenti said companies are trying to move from this broader identity to a narrower sense of personal identification. Pescenti said: "Facial recognition is especially valuable when it comes to private operations on individual devices. This facial recognition on personal devices does not require facial data communication with an external server and is currently a common method used to unlock smartphones. ”
Regulatory pressures
Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame, believes the decision is "good for both users and companies." She said the move also shows the power of regulatory pressure, as facial recognition systems have been heavily criticized for more than a decade.
Sharon Bradford Franklin, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's security and surveillance program, said facial recognition is an area where "technology is evolving" faster than "regulations are perfecting."
Racial bias when using facial recognition technology is a concern. Researchers and privacy professionals have been questioning the technology for years, citing research that found that the technology's role is not stable when race, gender or age boundaries are involved, with much higher misidentification rates of black and brown faces compared to white faces. There have been previous reports that Facebook's artificial intelligence mistakenly labeled a "primate" tag on a video about black people.
Facial recognition technology has advanced in recent years, with more and more law enforcement agencies also using it, prompting privacy experts to call for its regulation. A report by the Government Accountability Office in August found that 18 of the 24 federal agencies surveyed reported using facial recognition, and about 10 planned to expand their use by 2023.
Privacy experts hailed Facebook's decision as an important step in the right direction.
Settlement of ethical issues
Some U.S. cities have moved to ban police and other municipal departments from using facial recognition software. In 2019, San Francisco was the first to declare the technology illegal.
Concerns about violating civil rights, privacy and racial discrimination have restricted government agencies' use of the technology in about 7 states and nearly 20 cities.
Facebook's move comes at a time when the tech industry is facing a reckoning with ethical issues using facial recognition technology. So far, IBM has permanently terminated the sale of facial recognition products, and Microsoft and Amazon have indefinitely suspended the sale of facial recognition technology to the police.
Reference Links:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-to-shut-down-and-delete-its-face-recognition-system/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/facebook-face-recognition-shutdown-1.6234288