Facebook could recognize your face in photos. You can set whether artificial intelligence is allowed to do this. We have 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 offers this option. The social network introduced automatic facial recognition a few years ago, but stopped it again in 2012 after major protests in Europe and Canada. A new attempt was made in April 2018 - however, users were asked whether they wanted to use the function.

After you have decided and responded to Facebook's question, you can change your decision at any time in the settings under "Face Recognition" (link only works if you are logged in to Facebook). 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 spokesman for the company says, facial recognition will remain inactive for that long.

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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 features 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).

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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 called a “template”. If photos and videos are uploaded in the future, the automatic system will generally first analyze all files to see whether people can be seen on them. 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.

Conclusion

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

The content is an article from our partner checked4you
Article image: Shutterstock / By sp3n

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