Over the past few years there has been growing concern, and intense debate about the ethics of facial recognition technology , with questions hovering over privacy or racial bias. Legislators, in most countries around the world, have yet to provide a clear set of rules clarifying how this technology should be used.
That is precisely the argument that Facebook has made to stop using facial recognition , since it has faced a barrage of criticism for its impact on users of this social network. Until now, users of the application could choose to participate in the feature that scanned their face in images and notified them if someone else on the platform had published a photo of them.
Privacy issues and racial bias
In a company post, Jerome Pesenti, the firm’s vice president of artificial intelligence, said: “Amid this constant uncertainty, we believe it is appropriate to limit the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of rare cases.” In 2019, a United States government study suggested that facial recognition algorithms were much less accurate in identifying African American and Asian faces compared to Caucasian faces.
African American women were even more likely to be misidentified , according to the study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Last year, Facebook also settled a long-running legal dispute over the way it scans and labels photos.
The case has been open and the investigation ongoing since 2015, until it was finally agreed that the company would pay $ 550 million to a group of users in Illinois who argued that its facial recognition tool violated state privacy laws.
Other tech firms such as Amazon and Microsoft have also suspended sales of facial recognition products to law enforcement as uses of the technology have become increasingly controversial, especially when it comes to privacy laws and racial bias. . Facebook, which in addition to managing the world’s largest social network, also owns Instagram and the messaging service WhatsApp, and has also come under increasing pressure from legislators and politicians from around the world, especially from the United States. States and the European Union.
Last month, for example, a former company employee accused the company of unethical behavior . Frances Haugen leaked to the press a series of internal documents that, she said, showed that Facebook had put profit before the safety and privacy of users.
However, the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg , said Ms. Haugen’s claims were part of a coordinated effort to “fabricate a false image” of the company. As a result, the firm recently announced that it would change its name, due to the huge reputational crisis it faces.
