Facebook Introduces New Facial Recognition and Privacy Features

Facebook is introducing new facial recognition features that will automatically notify users when their photo is posted on the social network, the company said in a blog post, according to Bloomberg.

The new features are being rolled out in the face of growing pressure on the company from regulators in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere who have criticized Facebook for spreading fake news, fostering hate speech, eroding civil discourse and trampling privacy rights. The facial recognition technology could help combat some abusive conduct on the network, the company said, although it may also raise additional privacy concerns.

The feature builds on technology Facebook already uses to suggest tags or labels for people in photos users post, Rob Sherman, the company’s deputy chief privacy officer, said in an interview. He said the new feature give users more control by informing them when their photo has been posted. They can review the post and then tag themselves, choose to leave themselves untagged or, if they are not comfortable with it, contact with the user who posted the photo to ask them to remove it, or file a complaint. A user must be part of the permitted audience for the page posting the photo in order to receive the notification.

An additional feature will also inform users if anyone across the entire social network tries to post a profile picture containing them, Joaquin Candela, Facebook’s director of applied machine learning, said in the blog. "We’re doing this to prevent people from impersonating others on Facebook," he said. Both features will be turned on-or-off via a single toggle in Facebook’s settings, Candela said.

The new features will be available everywhere except Europe and Canada, where privacy regulators have previously raised objections to Facebook’s auto photo tagging feature, Sherman said. Nipun Mather, a product manager in the company’s applied machine learning group, said in an interview that the facial recognition features build on advances the company’s artificial intelligence researchers have made in computer vision.

The company also said it was adding facial recognition to its "automatic alt-text tool," which allows visually impaired people to hear an audio description of what is in an image on Facebook. Introduced two years ago, the technology recognizes broad object categories like "trees" or "river" and will now be able to read out the names of people in the photos too, provided they Facebook users. But the system is still not sophisticated enough to provide a full description of the action in a scene.