Pros and Cons: Facial recognition on Facebook

Facebook is asking its members in Europe whether they want to use automatic facial recognition in photos and videos.

Our cooperation partner “Checked4you” has arguments for and against.

Would you like an automatic system to recognize you in photos and videos without a human having to tag you there? Facebook is now offering this option again in Europe. The social network introduced automatic facial recognition a few years ago, but stopped it again in 2012 after major protests in Europe and Canada.

Now users will be asked if they want to use the feature:

After you have decided and responded to Facebook's question, you can change your decision at any time in the settings under "Face Recognition" . However, if you have not answered the question, the menu item will not appear in your settings. You then have to wait until Facebook asks you the question again. As a company spokesman says, facial recognition will remain inactive for that long.

Here we list what a yes to facial recognition can do:

Benefits of facial recognition on Facebook

• If someone copies your profile picture and impersonates you, you can be notified. Because Facebook recognizes your face. This can, for example, help against fraud with fake friends .
• If someone posts a photo that includes you, you can be notified. However, there is a caveat: Facebook explains that you will not be notified if the image has been published to a target group that you do not belong to (e.g. Friends Only or a specific selection of friends).
• People with visual impairments can have someone read to them who appears in photos and videos.

Disadvantages of facial recognition

• All photos and videos are automatically scanned. The artificial intelligence should then evaluate who can be seen on it. It is unclear how exactly it works when people look very similar.
• The insights gained can be used to tailor the advertisements even more precisely to your preferences and to analyze your life.
• Data that once exists on the Internet is difficult to delete. Facebook says it doesn't want to share facial recognition data with other companies. But WhatsApp said that right after it was taken over by Facebook and companies can change their plans at some point.
• Facebook's deputy data protection officer Rob Sherman writes that the technology cannot be used to identify unknown people. From our point of view, this would be entirely possible with the help of software for visually impaired people (see above).

This is how facial recognition is supposed to work

Facebook explains to us how facial recognition works technically:

The automatic system analyzes individual pixels (image points) of photos and videos in which people have already been tagged. This creates a string of numbers that Facebook calls a “template.” If photos and videos are uploaded in the future, the automatic system will generally first analyze all files to see whether they contain images of people. It compares the faces it contains with existing templates. If a user has not consented to recognition, there should be no template for them and they should not be identifiable in images.

According to Facebook, the templates should be deleted if users no longer want to take part in facial recognition after consent and switch it off. According to a spokeswoman, there should be no link to advertising or suggestions for new friends. In addition, she asserts that there are currently no plans to pass on the data to other Facebook companies such as WhatsApp, Instagram or Oculus.

Our conclusion

For us, the dangers of facial recognition have so far outweighed the risks and we would therefore not activate it.

Facebook poll

We asked our fans if they have facial recognition turned on. The result was clear!

A total of 10,789 users cast their votes within 13 hours, as you can see in this screenshot.

964 users have activated facial recognition on Facebook. And almost 10,000 users, or more precisely 9,833, decided against it and did not activate facial recognition!