“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.”
Nearly 5 weeks ago, Facebook(or Meta) announced their plans to shut down their Facial Recognition system. For years, Facebook has offered users the option of receiving automatic notifications when they appear in images or videos posted by others, as well as suggestions for who to tag in photos. The services it provides, as well as the setting allowing customers to opt into the system, will be deleted over the next weeks as we phase out the use of our existing Face Recognition technology. This represented a huge, although predictable, change in the way we view and use AI.
With a possible “complete ban” of facial recognition being discussed in the EU, the security risks of the technology are there for everyone to see. You may be able to opt out of or turn off face recognition on a device or software you own, but the prevalence of cameras makes the technology increasingly impossible to avoid in public. Concerns over this ubiquity, fueled by evidence of racial profiling and protester identification, have prompted big corporations such as Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft to halt sales of their products to law enforcement agencies. Microsoft has partnered with an Australian bank to replace ATM cards with facial scans and is advertising other applications.
Amazon is selling its facial recognition technology to a Korean company that utilises face scans for event tickets and a Pittsburgh-based startup that creates sex trafficking investigative tools.
Investors continue to funnel funds to technology based on facial recognition. Oosto, a facial recognition technology used in Israeli checkpoints, recently received funding of over $235 million. While Microsoft pledged to remove facial recognition, a lot of their technology is still active and in use for policing all around the world.
Simply put, the expected drop off in facial recognition tech and its implementation will in all likelihood be a temporary phase. Companies will always try to make the most out of their applications and facial recognition is one such technology that has the potential to make them millions based on the idea of security it provides. Brandishing facial recognition as illegal won’t ever help due to the inevitability of the field. Rather, regulation of it in terms of usable tech, would help set guides or paths for what companies need to do to achieve widespread facial recognition without denying people their rights or not considering their consent.
Consent- right to privacy based issues will continue to plague the field, but with the amount of people rallying up in opposition to it, companies will try their best to please people, by showcasing the security of their data and giving more power to the user to choose what gets recorded. If it's done right, we would have moved a step closer towards a technology dominated world of ease. Until then, we wait and see.
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