Facial Recognition Facebook
Debora Mccaffery
In the coming weeks, Meta will shut down the Face Recognition system on Facebook as part of a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products. As part of this change, people who have opted in to our Face Recognition setting will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos, and we will delete the facial recognition template used to identify them.
Making this change required careful consideration, because we have seen a number of places where face recognition can be highly valued by people using platforms. For example, our award-winning automatic alt text system, that uses advanced AI to generate descriptions of images for people who are blind and visually impaired, uses the Face Recognition system to tell them when they or one of their friends is in an image.
For many years, Facebook has also given people the option to be automatically notified when they appear in photos or videos posted by others, and provided recommendations for who to tag in photos. These features are also powered by the Face Recognition system which we are shutting down.
Looking ahead, we still see facial recognition technology as a powerful tool, for example, for people needing to verify their identity, or to prevent fraud and impersonation. We believe facial recognition can help for products like these with privacy, transparency and control in place, so you decide if and how your face is used. We will continue working on these technologies and engaging outside experts.
But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.
This includes services that help people gain access to a locked account, verify their identity in financial products or unlock a personal device. These are places where facial recognition is both broadly valuable to people and socially acceptable, when deployed with care. While we will continue working on use cases like these, we will ensure people have transparency and control over whether they are automatically recognized.
Every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance. In the case of facial recognition, its long-term role in society needs to be debated in the open, and among those who will be most impacted by it. We will continue engaging in that conversation and working with the civil society groups and regulators who are leading this discussion.
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Yet revelations as to how the company obtains images for their database of nearly 30 billion photos have caused an uproar. Last week, CEO Hoan Ton-That said in an interview with BBC that the company obtained its photos without users' knowledge, scraped from social media platforms like Facebook and provided them to U.S. law enforcement. The CEO also said that the database has been used by American law police nearly a million times since 2017.
In a statement to Insider, Ton-That said that the database of images was "lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google." Notably, "lawful" does not, in this context, imply that the users whose photos were scraped gave consent.
"Clearview AI's database is used for after-the-crime investigations by law enforcement, and is not available to the general public," the CEO told Insider. "Every photo in the dataset is a potential clue that could save a life, provide justice to an innocent victim, prevent a wrongful identification, or exonerate an innocent person."
As reported by the BBC, Clearview AI has faced millions of dollars in fines for breaches of privacy in Europe and Australia. In the BBC interview, Miami Police confirmed that it uses this software and treats it as a tip for investigations for all crimes, and that it helped solve some murders.
"We don't make an arrest because an algorithm tells us to," said Assistant Chief of Police Armando Aguilar. "We either put that name in a photographic line-up or we go about solving the case through traditional means."
Clearview is no stranger to lawsuits over potential violations of privacy law. In May 2020, the The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against Clearview alleging that the company violated Illinois residents' privacy rights under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). According to the ACLU, following a settlement, Clearview has been banned from making its faceprint database available to private entities and most businesses in the United States.
While Clearview claims its technology is highly accurate, there are stories that suggest otherwise. For example, the New York Times recently reported on a wrongful arrest of a man, claiming that he used stolen credit cards to buy designer purses. The police department had a contract with Clearview, according to the report, and it was used in the investigation to identify him.
"Even if Clearview AI came up with the initial result, that is the beginning of the investigation by law enforcement to determine, based on other factors, whether the correct person has been identified," he told the Times. "More than one million searches have been conducted using Clearview AI."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has described facial recognition technology as "a growing menace to racial justice, privacy, free speech, and information security." In 2022, the organization praised the multiple lawsuits it faced.
"One of the worst offenders is Clearview AI, which extracts faceprints from billions of people without their consent and uses these faceprints to help police identify suspects," the EFF stated. "For example, police in Miami worked with Clearview to identify participants in a Black-led protest against police violence."
Meta, owners of Facebook told Insider recently that the scraping by Clearview invades "people's privacy. Meta said that they "banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services."
"I think that's one of the nefarious things about it," Guariglia told Insider. "Because you might be very aware of what Clearview does, and so prevent any of your social media profiles from being crawled by Google, to make sure that the picture you post isn't publicly accessible on the open web, and you think 'this might keep me safe.' But the thing about Clearview is it recognizes pictures of you anywhere on the web."
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The question of whether you should let Facebook save your face is gaining in urgency as it moves to expand its deployment of facial recognition, rolling it out in Europe, where it was scrapped in 2012 over privacy concerns and scanning and identifying more people in photos.
At the same time, the giant social network is attempting to quash efforts to restrict the use of facial recognition in the U.S., from legislation to litigation. And consumer groups are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook's widening use of the technology.
A survey taken after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's congressional testimony last week showed a sharp decline in public confidence. Some 27% respondents agreed with the statement, "Facebook is committed to protecting the privacy of my personal information," down from 79% in 2017, according to think tank the Ponemon Institute.
Facial recognition, sometimes called faceprinting, is used by major technology companies around the globe. Apple last year replaced its fingerprint reader with a camera that uses your face to unlock the iPhone.
In December, Facebook expanded the scope of its technology with the announcement that it would let users know when someone posts a photo of them, even if they are not tagged in it. The technology informs you if someone uses a photo of you in their profile picture to help detect impersonations. It also makes it possible for the visually impaired to have screen readers tell them who's tagged in friends' photos.
Privacy experts have been sounding the alarm over the potentially invasive uses of facial recognition for years as cameras proliferate and the technology advances, from retailers using it to identify shoplifters to sporting venues to spot potential troublemakers.
Yet Facebook has aggressively pushed back against limits that states have considered imposing on commercial uses of facial recognition, according to the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative non-profit.
Of legislation that would have created new privacy protections for facial recognition proposed in 2017, all failed but one, and then only after the scope was limited, according to the group. Facebook keeps its fingerprints off the bills by relying on trade groups for stealthier pushes on legislation that would hand users more control over how their likenesses are used, the Center for Public Integrity said, citing interviews with lawmakers and records. Facebook declined to comment.
The law requires companies to get permission from consumers before collecting biometric data such as fingerprints, iris scans and images of faces. In 2015, three users sued on behalf of millions of Facebook users in Illinois under the law, claiming that Facebook did not obtain written consent from users or properly notify them about how their information would be used or or how long it would be kept.
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