Facebook’s Push for Facial Recognition Prompts Privacy Alarms
Facebook’s Push for Facial Recognition Prompts Privacy
Alarms
CreditMinh Uong/The New York Times
By Natasha Singer July 9, 2018
When Facebook rolled out facial recognition tools in the
European Union this year, it promoted the technology as a way to help people
safeguard their online identities.
“Face recognition technology allows us to help protect
you from a stranger using your photo to impersonate you,” Facebook told its
users in Europe.
It was a risky move by the social network. Six years
earlier, it had deactivated the technology in Europe after regulators there
raised questions about its facial recognition consent system. Now, Facebook was
reintroducing the service as part of an update of its user permission process
in Europe.
Yet Facebook is taking a huge reputational risk in
aggressively pushing the technology at a time when its data-mining practices
are under heightened scrutiny in the United States and Europe. Already, more
than a dozen privacy and consumer groups, and at least a few officials, argue
that the company’s use of facial recognition has violated people’s privacy by
not obtaining appropriate user consent.
The complaints add to the barrage of criticism facing the
Silicon Valley giant over its handling of users’ personal details. Several
American government agencies are currently investigating Facebook’s response to
the harvesting of its users’ data by Cambridge Analytica, a political
consulting firm.
Facebook’s push to spread facial recognition also puts
the company at the center of a broader and intensifying debate about how the
powerful technology should be handled. The technology can be used to remotely
identify people by name without their knowledge or consent. While proponents
view it as a high-tech tool to catch criminals, civil liberties experts warn it
could enable a mass surveillance system.
Facial recognition works by scanning faces of unnamed
people in photos or videos and then matching codes of their facial patterns to
those in a database of named people. Facebook has said that users are in charge
of that process, telling them: “You control face recognition.”
But critics said people cannot actually control the
technology — because Facebook scans their faces in photos even when their
facial recognition setting is turned off.
“Facebook tries to explain their practices in ways that
make Facebook look like the good guy, that they are somehow protecting your
privacy,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. “But it doesn’t get at the fact
that they are scanning every photo.”
Rochelle Nadhiri, a Facebook spokeswoman, said its system
analyzes faces in users’ photos to check whether they match with those who have
their facial recognition setting turned on. If the system cannot find a match,
she said, it does not identify the unknown face and immediately deletes the
facial data.
At the heart of the issue is Facebook’s approach to user
consent.
In the European Union, a tough new data protection law
called the General Data Protection Regulation now requires companies to obtain
explicit and “freely given” consent before collecting sensitive information
like facial data. Some critics, including the former government official who
originally proposed the new law, contend that Facebook tried to improperly
influence user consent by promoting facial recognition as an identity
protection tool.
Facebook notified users in Europe this year that they
could choose to turn on the social network’s facial recognition services. Some
critics say Facebook tried to manipulate consent by promoting the service as an
identity protection tool.
“Facebook is somehow threatening me that, if I do not buy
into face recognition, I will be in danger,” said Viviane Reding, the former
justice commissioner of the European Commission who is now a member of the
European Parliament. “It goes completely against the European law because it
tries to manipulate consent.”
European regulators also have concerns about Facebook’s
facial recognition practices. In Ireland, where Facebook’s international
headquarters are, a spokeswoman for the Data Protection Commission said
regulators “have put a number of specific queries to Facebook in respect of
this technology.” Regulators were assessing Facebook’s responses, she said.
In the United States, Facebook is fighting a lawsuit
brought by Illinois residents claiming the company’s face recognition practices
violated a state privacy law. Damages in the case, certified as a class action
in April, could amount to billions of dollars. In May, an appeals court granted
Facebook’s request to delay the trial and review the class certification order.
Nikki Sokol, associate general counsel at Facebook, said
in a statement, “This lawsuit is without merit and we will defend ourselves
vigorously.”
Separately, privacy and consumer groups lodged a
complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in April saying Facebook added
facial recognition services, like the feature to help identify impersonators,
without obtaining prior consent from people before turning it on. The groups
argued that Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree that prohibits it from
deceptive privacy practices.
“Facebook routinely makes misrepresentations to induce
consumers to adopt wider and more pervasive uses of facial recognition technology,”
the complaint said.
Ms. Nadhiri said Facebook had designed its consent
process to comply with the new European law and had previewed its approach with
European regulators. As to the privacy groups’ complaint, she said the social
network had notified users about expanded facial recognition services.
“We provide clear information to people about how we use
face recognition technology,” Ms. Nadhiri wrote in an email. The company’s
recently updated privacy section, she added, “shows people how the setting
works in simple language.”
Facebook is hardly the only tech giant to embrace facial
recognition technology. Over the last few years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
Google and Microsoft have filed facial recognition patent applications.
In May, civil liberties groups criticized Amazon for
marketing facial technology, called Rekognition, to police departments. The
company has said the technology has also been used to find lost children at
amusement parks and other purposes. (The New York Times has also used Amazon’s
technology, including for the recent royal wedding.)
Critics said Facebook took an early lead in consumer
facial recognition services partly by turning on the technology as the default
option for users. In 2010, it introduced a photo-labeling feature called Tag
Suggestions that used face-matching software to suggest the names of people in
users’ photos.
People could turn it off. But privacy experts said
Facebook had neither obtained users’ opt-in consent for the technology nor
explicitly informed them that the company could benefit from scanning their
photos.
“When Tag Suggestions asks you ‘Is this Jill?’ you don’t
think you are annotating faces to improve Facebook’s face recognition
algorithm,” said Brian Brackeen, the chief executive of Kairos, a facial
recognition company. “Even the premise is an unfair use of people’s time and
labor.”
The huge trove of identified faces, he added, enabled
Facebook to quickly develop one of the world’s most powerful commercial facial
recognition engines. In 2014, Facebook researchers said they had trained
face-matching software “on the largest facial dataset to date, an identity
labeled dataset of four million facial images.”
Ms. Nadhiri said Facebook had consulted with privacy
experts on its photo-tagging feature. It also recently notified users in the
United States who had the site’s face-identification services turned on that
they could turn them off, she said. “We have always respected people’s
choices,” she said.
But Facebook may only be getting started with its facial
recognition services. The social network has applied for various patents, many
of them still under consideration, which show how it could use the technology
to track its online users in the real world.
One patent application, published last November,
described a system that could detect consumers within stores and match those
shoppers’ faces with their social networking profiles. Then it could analyze
the characteristics of their friends, and other details, using the information
to determine a “trust level” for each shopper. Consumers deemed “trustworthy”
could be eligible for special treatment, like automatic access to merchandise
in locked display cases, the document said.
Another Facebook patent filing described how cameras near
checkout counters could capture shoppers’ faces, match them with their social
networking profiles and then send purchase confirmation messages to their
phones.
In their F.T.C. complaint, privacy groups — led by the
Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research institution — said
the patent filings showed how Facebook could make money from users’ faces. A
previous EPIC complaint about Facebook helped precipitate a consent decree
requiring the company to give users more control over their personal details.
“Facebook’s patent applications attest to the company’s
primary commercial purposes in expanding its biometric data collection and the
pervasive uses of facial recognition technology that it envisions for the near
future,” the current complaint said.
Ms. Nadhiri said that Facebook often sought patents for
technology it never put into effect and that patent filings were not an
indication of the company’s plans.
But legal filings in the class-action suit hint at the
technology’s importance to Facebook’s business.
The case was brought by Illinois consumers who said that
Facebook collected and stored their facial data without their explicit, prior
consent — in violation, they claim, of a state biometric privacy law.
If the suit were to move forward, Facebook’s lawyers
argued in a recent court document, “the reputational and economic costs to
Facebook will be irreparable.”
Doris Burke contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on July 9,
2018 of the New York edition with the headline: Facebook Pores Over Its Prize
Asset: Faces.
Comments
Post a Comment