Facebook Is Killing Its Face Recognition System Due to ‘Social Concerns’
The company plans to shutter its long-criticized technology
In January 2019, millions of Facebook users posted before-and-after pictures of themselves under the hashtag “10YearsChallenge.” The idea was to score social media points by showing how the passage of time changed your looks.
It was all fun (5.2 million impressions in under three days) until a techie theorized there could be an underlying goal behind the campaign. What if the whole thing was a ploy to train Facebook’s facial recognition algorithms?
Facebook spokespeople answered O’Neill’s semi-sarcastic tweet by claiming the challenge was user-generated and went viral on its own. “Facebook gains nothing from this meme (besides reminding us of the questionable fashion trends of 2009),” they added. “As a reminder, Facebook users can choose to turn facial recognition on or off at any time.”
O’Neill’s post was arguably the buzziest thing we heard about Facebook’s facial recognition system…
