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Raji said it is always good when companies take public steps to signal that the technology is dangerous, but warned that people should not rely on voluntary corporate protection actions. Whether Facebook’s decision to limit the use of face recognition makes a bigger difference will depend on politicians.
“If this prompts politicians to take the face recognition conversation seriously enough to actually pass some legislation through Congress and really stand up for it and lean on it, then it will be a turning point or a critical moment,” he said. she.
Despite the sometimes bipartisan rhetoric about the threat that face recognition poses to civil liberties and the lack of standards used by law enforcement, Congress has not passed any laws regulating the use of technology or setting standards for how companies or governments can use face recognition. .
In a statement shared with WIRED, the group Fight for the Future said that Facebook knows that face recognition is dangerous and renewed calls for a ban on the use of technology.
“Even when the algorithms improve, face recognition will only be more dangerous,” the group said. “This technology will allow authoritarian governments to target and break up religious minorities and political dissent; will automate the referral of people to prisons without making us safer; will create new tools for harassment, abuse and identity theft. “
Sneha Revanur, founder of Encode Justice, a group for young people seeking an end to the use of algorithms that automate oppression, said in a statement that the news was a hard-won victory for privacy and racial justice advocates and youth organizers. She said it was one of many reforms needed to tackle hate speech, misinformation and surveillance allowed by social media companies.
Luke Stark is an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario and a longtime critic of facial recognition. It is called pseudoscience for face recognition and computer vision with implications for biometric confidentiality, anti-discrimination law and civil liberties. In 2019, he claimed that face recognition was the plutonium of AI.
Stark said he believes Facebook’s action is a PR tactic and a diversion designed to grab good headlines, not a major change in philosophy. But he said the move also shows a company that does not want to be associated with toxic technologies.
He linked the decision to Facebook’s recent focus on virtual reality and the metaverse. Feeding custom avatars will require the collection of other types of physiological data and will raise new privacy concerns, he said. Stark also questioned the impact of removing the face recognition database because he doesn’t know anyone under the age of 45 who posts photos on Facebook.
Facebook described its decision as “one of the biggest changes in the use of face recognition in the history of technology.” But Stark predicts that “the actual impact will be negligible” because Facebook has not completely abandoned face recognition and others are still using it.
“I think it could be a turning point if people who are concerned about these technologies keep pushing the conversation,” he said.
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