Yes, there is more to it than meets the eye. Facebook, however, has over and over again shown it chooses profit over safety. What went wrong with profit?
by Victor Cherubim
Facebook has been in the news. It has changed its name to “Meta”. Why do people change their name or their identity? Is it because they have lost credibility, is it because millions have lost trust with FB, or both?Was the tag, a fad at the start, which its glamour in time?
Yes, there is more to it than meets the eye. Facebook, however, has over and over again shown it chooses profit over safety. What went wrong with profit?
Facebook’s iconic blue thumbs up sign has come down replaced by a new logo at its US H.O. – a compressed “infinity sign,” in varying hues of blue, is in its place. We are told that its social media App will still be called “Facebook,” “Instagram” will still be Instagram and “What’s App” has not changed. The Company stock will start trading under a new “MVRS” sticker or tickler starting December 1, 2021.
The rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work from intense scrutiny. Anti-Trust regulators in US and elsewhere, we are told are trying to break up the Company and public trust in how FB does business is falling, asits days of greater focus on the next generation of technology, loom large. Has Facebook lustre faded? It’s anybody’s guess?
Name change is nothing new?
Google too changed its holding Company name in 2015 to “Alphabet,” partly to signal it was no longer only a “search engine”. It is now a sprawling conglomerate with its offshoots making “driverless cars” and health tech. All this innovation is about the way the internet revolves after the mobile internet.
“Metaverse” was a term coined originally by Sci-Fi novelist, Neal Stephenson to describe a visual world people escape to from a “dystopian, real world”.
The name “Meta” was probably chosen to echo the key product that Mark Zuckerberg hopes the new/old company will represent which is, a 3D virtual space that a number of companies are already interested in creating – a sort of future version of the internet.
So why after 17 years of F/B existence and as critics accuse it of “data mining,” “gas lighting” and “mental manipulation” of what and how people interact, Facebook now,
“Meta” wants to “create” a distraction of sorts.
Where does this distraction start?
Facebook said yesterday 2 November, 2021, that it would stop using Facial Recognition technology to tag or identify people in photos and videos. It would even go further by deleting accompanying data on more than 1 billion people worldwide.
This news marks the end of one of the largest known facial recognition systems in the world. Many know that Facebook’s automatic tag is perhaps the most common form of facial recognition AI Technology that people have encountered, if not endured, over years. It is also well known that “Facebook has used facial recognition to automatically detect people all over the world in photos, videos and “F/B Memories” since 2010. This has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and has incurred millions of dollar fines from government regulators. Cues and signals about a person’s social circle that have been gathered from these photos and videos using facial recognition, have been used to intimidate people”, perhaps, criminalise them.
F/B which started as a social media tool, suddenly helped to create social unrest in many parts of the world, e.g., in Sudan, Ethiopia and in Burma where applications of facial recognition by law enforcement have led to multiple wrongful arrests. Besides, one in three F/B users around the world today uses its service that recommends people to tag in a photo. It must also be said that people have used facial recognition “as fun”.
Further,” Deep Face” by Facebook was the first AI model to achieve human level performance in facial recognition, sparking a trend of commercialising this technology and hoarding face data to power performance improvements. Everything has a use, a time and place?
IBM stopped offering facial recognition to customers last year. Amazon and Microsoft paused their sales of facial recognition services, citing a lack of action by regulators. Google, distanced from facial recognition on grounds of ethics. Even as algorithms improve over the years, Facebook had no choice but to recognise the widespread criticism and caved in, after weeks of intense scrutiny following the leak of thousands of internal documents that revealed loopholes in moderation, to accept the deletion of data from images of more than 1 billion people.
Will Facebook be only a change in name and not its ethics?
One thing is known, that Facebook’s document business, according to reliable researchers is falling. AI researcher Deb Raji said: “it’s always good when companies take public steps to signal that technology is dangerous.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology analysis confirmed that the tech often misidentifies Asian people, young people and others.
We are also informed that the end of facial recognition for photo tags does not mean Facebook is ending outright facial recognition use. F/B will still use the technology to do things like help users gain access to locked accounts or verify their identity in order to complete a transaction. However, Facebook will no longer use facial recognition to identify people by name, especially for people who are blind or visually impaired.
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