Facebook, in a stunning announcement today proclaimed they will be stopping the use of their platform’s facial recognition system, which is used to automatically identify users and tag them in photos. Although the feature is optional, the Tech Giant has still drawn intense scrutiny about the extent of which they may or may not violate their user’s privacy and/or safety.
Reuters, was one of the outlets to first break this announcement:
Facebook Inc. announced on Tuesday it is shutting down its facial recognition system which automatically identifies users in photos and videos, citing growing societal concerns about the use of such technology.
“Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook in a blog post. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”
The removal will roll out globally and is expected to be complete by December, a Facebook spokesperson said.
The removal of face recognition by the world’s largest social media platform comes as the tech industry has faced a reckoning over the past few years amid criticism that the technology could falsely identify people as part of crimes, or favor white faces over people of color.
Facebook has also been under intense scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over user safety and a wide range of abuses on its platforms.
According to a tweet by AP they are deleting over 1 BILLION faceprints!
BREAKING: Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people. “This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history,” said a blog post. https://t.co/X0VNLDtaCB
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 2, 2021
This news is a MASSIVE blow to Facebook, as the water continues to boil in the tech giant billionaire’s pot.
The announcement comes just months after a monumental settlement Facebook was ordered to make to the tune of $650 Million. The Judge ruled the company’s biometric tagging feature was a violation of the state’s (Illinois) Biometric Information Privacy Act. It was one of the largest lawsuits EVER!
Business Insider reported this story back in February:
Judge approves $650 million settlement of Facebook privacy lawsuit linked to facial photo tagging
A federal judge has approved a settlement in which Facebook will pay $650 million to users who sued the social media company over its tagging feature.
The settlement, which is one of the largest-ever from a privacy lawsuit, was a “landmark result,” said US Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California in his Friday order. About 1.6 million people who joined the lawsuit will receive a payout of at least $345, the lawsuit said.
“Overall, the settlement is a major win for consumers in the hotly contested area of digital privacy,” wrote Judge Donato. “The standing issue makes this settlement all the more valuable because Facebook and other big tech companies continue to fight the proposition that a statutory privacy violation is a genuine harm.”
The class-action case was first filed in Illinois in 2015. Facebook users claimed the company had violated the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, which prohibits a private entity from collecting, storing, or using biometric identifiers or information without prior notification and written consent.
Here’s a great video from about three years ago of Senator Kennedy (one of the few politicians I still care for) taking Mark Zuckerberg to the WOOD SHED over it’s user agreement:
This is exactly what happens when We, The People continue to stand up for our individual rights and liberties.
The more we speak out, the more pressure we place on companies like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and others, the more they are FORCED to provide transparency into their true motives.
One of those motives was questioned recently regarding Facebook Inc’s Instagram
Internal documents leaked showing internal studies in which the company knew their platform was a direct factor for increased mental health vulnerability in teen girls.
The New York Post summarized:
Facebook has conducted internal studies that found Instagram is harmful to teen girls and exacerbates body image issues, anxiety and depression — even though the company’s executives have publicly extoled the mental-health benefits of social media, a new report says.
Facebook for the past three years has been conducting studies into how its Instagram app affects its millions of young users, repeatedly finding that it’s toxic for many of them, especially teenage girls, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing internal documents.
“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers reportedly wrote in a March 2020 presentation.
If you haven’t had your daily Red Pill today, then here you go:
Remember when Facebook first came online?
It was 2004. To Harvard students.
Time recounts on 1 year anniversary:
Remember TheFacebook.com?
When TheFacebook launched on this day, Feb. 4, in 2004, it was for a limited audience and offered limited capabilities — and, the first time the site showed up in TIME, the writer had an appropriately limited amount to say about it.
The site’s first mention in TIME was later that year, in a story about online dating for the college set, in which Facebook’s founders insisted that their site didn’t belong in that group:
The operators of college dating sites sometimes don’t like to admit their sites are for dating, preferring to play up how they enhance student life in general. Chris Hughes, a rising junior at Harvard who helped start Thefacebook.com at his school earlier this year, says when his roommate Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea, it was to be “a directory of information for college students.” Offering Friendsteresque features, it allows students to network through friends and connect with people in their classes they would like to meet. The site now boasts 58 member colleges, including all of the Ivy League.
Many are familiar with the Department of Defense’s research and develop arm , the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In 2003-2004, DARPA was working with the Pentagon on a special program called “LifeLog”.
At the time it was said to be a “an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence”.
Or in other words, an extremely sketchy but sophisticated system to data mine human beings into becoming information cattle.
On February 4, 2004 Wire reported that the Pentagon had killed the project:
THE PENTAGON CANCELED its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.
Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.
LifeLog’s backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians immediately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, arguing that LifeLog could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state.
As the article continues, remember this brief paragraph because it’s very important:
Researchers close to the project say they’re not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn’t provided an explanation for LifeLog’s quiet cancellation. “A change in priorities” is the only rationale agency spokeswoman Jan Walker gave to Wired News.
However, related Darpa efforts concerning software secretaries and mechanical brains are still moving ahead as planned.
Now, allow me to show you something incredibly creepy.
Remember the date; February 4, 2004.
The day DARPA and the Pentagon terminated the LifeLog project.
What was the exact date that thefacebook.com went live at Harvard:
Well, a quick glance at Wikipedia shows us.
So I’m not sure what to say.
Looks kind of sketchy to me. Exact same day. Similar platform and mission. Someone’s entire life in a government database was LifeLog.
So what is Facebook?
And if you know anything about Harvard and it’s connection to the intelligence community, you have to scratch your head and wonder if the clowns were on campus back in the early 2000s looking at ways to launder this project through a private entity.
What’s sick about this entire thing is that over the past couple of decades we have FREELY given up this information so we could look cool on the internet to our friends. At least that’s how I reflect on it.
At the time we didn’t know and were just caught up in the hype. Which no doubt was exacerbated by a corporate media complex chomping at the bit to inject their newest information parasite into our minds.
Anyways, you can decide for yourself.
Comment below on your thoughts. I’d love to know if you think Mark’s a lizard.
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