Facebook and Meta won’t finally give up on facial recognition

Changing the Facebook name is already paying off. While Mark Zuckerberg recently chose to rename its company to Meta — to underscore its new metaverse-related ambitions and to make people forget about pots — the “new” web giant is already controversial. The topic of discussion this week is the controversial use of facial recognition in its web products.

Just a few days ago, Facebook (the social network) let a tease that it decided to give up its facial recognition tools. Even if the job required pre-approval from internet users, the company now felt that the use of such technology raised a lot of ethical questions at the moment. A wise decision on the part of GAFAM, which ultimately had an impact Big lost touch.

Metaverse, we take the same and start over

While Facebook appears to have taken a few steps to erase recent Facebook files, Meta has not. Thus the company made it known that Abandoning facial recognition will only apply to the Facebook platform and not to the entire group, site reports Recode. Products related to the metaverse in particular continue to use this technology. Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse clarified in an official statement that facial recognition “It is an approach that we will continue to explore as we think about how future computing platforms and devices can better meet people’s needs.”

Among the tools that will continue to be used for metaverse development, Meta cites in particular an example DeepFace, an artificial intelligence technology Capable of matching artificial intelligence-generated models of faces with real faces, usually borrowed from Facebook’s massive database.

An unsurprising choice coming from the old Facebook group, and it finally makes sense. The company has never hidden the ambitions associated with aligning its metaverse, and has long been planning for it To cover upcoming virtual reality headsets with biometric sensors, in order to reproduce the faces of its users as faithfully as possible.