Facebook Rejects Face Recognition Technology

Officially, it became known that Facebook (or, as we should call it now, Meta) is abandoning the facial recognition mechanism and deleting the data of more than a billion of its users. This technology has been used by the company since 2010 and gained access to the data of those persons who gave their permission to process it. It analyzed an image, memorized the user's face creating a unique pattern, and recognized it in other photos and videos automatically.

Modern research shows such systems' low efficiency and accuracy and the high probability of erroneous results due to racial bias. The US government conducted a major study in this area in 2019 and found that the technology is failing to recognize Asian and African American faces compared to Caucasians. In particular, it does an extremely bad job of defining African-American females.

At the same time, regulators have not yet developed clear rules on the use of face recognition technologies. In this confusing and unstable situation, Facebook representatives decided to abandon such systems until a better moment. It will entail the disabling of some functions of the social network, as well as negatively affect the work of mechanisms that create image descriptions for users with vision impairment. By the way, Windows and Amazon, which provided the police with similar technologies, also suspended their work in this area.

Facebook has already had a lawsuit in the past with Illinois users who said the recognition system violated their privacy. As a result, the company had to pay considerable compensation for the damage caused. How do you feel about such technologies? Do you think there is more benefit than harm from it? Please share your opinion on this really important topic.