Remember way back when in the yesteryear of 2010, when the quaint little site known as Facebook decided to make it easier for you to tag your friends in photos? It was a great way to make sure people didn't miss out on a memory of a fun event.
Fast forward a decade or so, where totalitarian regimes are using Facebook to spy on citizens breaking Covid lockdowns, and it's taken on a whole new monstrous form.
Surprisingly, the tech giant has decided to scrap the software:
Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook, announced the changes in a blog post Tuesday, citing the technology's possible negative effects as well as regulatory uncertainty as reasons behind the decision.
"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," Pesenti wrote. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."
Facebook has had a lot of criticism for the way it has bent to the whims of regimes and allowed criminals like cartel lords and traffickers to use their site. They are not a sunshine-and-happy-rainbows company.
If Facebook is this concerned about the way its facial recognition can be used, there's some seriously bad stuff afoot.
Facebook will delete the facial scans of over one billion people, or nearly one-third of its user base, as part of the changes. The company will no longer automatically recognize people's faces in Facebook Memories, photos or videos, and it will no longer automatically suggest "tags" based on facial recognition.
I'd applaud Zuck and crew for their transparency and commitment to individual rights, but there's that stuff about cracking down on "misinformation" by banning users and hiding content, so let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Oh yeah, and there's all that weird-as-heck metaverse stuff too...
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