The thing that surprises me about the facial recognition news is that I was expecting it to be the other way around. For meta to outlaw it.<p>The reason for the re-name is to separate Zuck and his new project from the toxic reputation that facebook has. So the logical thing to do is to get <i>meta</i> to outlaw facial recognition, as a first indication that it's going to do business differently from how facebook was operated.<p>Instead this is really interesting. Zuck has 'moved' from facebook to meta, and apparently, plans to bring his complete lack of ethics along with him (or to put it generously, his ignorant view of the world). Could we see the next evolution in facebook to be a social media platform that the company has decided is the past- and therefore they can afford to run it more ethically and be more considered about their abuse of their users. Become the warm and fuzzy that some parts of microsoft have become. Meanwhile Zuck moves to the "metaverse" which is him and a few others desparately trying to carry out the exploitation he succeeded with in the heyday of Facebook?<p>Or to put it another way - it would be genuinely surprising if Zuck has the self-awareness to realise that Facebook's brand can be rehabilitated but that <i>his</i> brand is what's poisoning it.
Works at Facebook, opinions are my own.
I find this article highly speculative. Facebook or Meta has not said anything on future uses, but that's for a lot of other things. Company hasn't said anything about not making weapons in the future as well.<p>In my opinion facial recognition technology has genuine uses, however from the privacy perspective, I personally would want all of these models to be running on my device. Google does it and so can other companies including Meta, and I find that completely fine as long as it's relevant to me and I have an option to turn it off.
Meta wants to capture your biometric data so that your facial expressions and body language can be mapped onto a 3D avatar in virtual reality. Is this really the future of the metaverse? or is it just what Mark Zuckerberg thinks what the metaverse should look like?<p>I am a little skeptical of this vision. And I imagine most of the "metaverse" will be experienced through flat screens - and text, voice, and video will remain dominate. VR will grow but do we really need to map our physical expressions onto an avatar to play games or collaborate together? Why go through all this complexity when we can just have controls to enable our 3D avatars to emote?<p>If you really want to convey facial expressions and a personable experience, just enable video.
"A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back."<p>It seems a big assumption that a technology occupying "the periphery of our attention" is calm. A lot of apps/sites are starting to do this 'dot where you have something you need to process', and although they are less obnoxious than notifications and popups, they are still a third party deciding that I need to do something, and worse, they hang around with their 'you have left something undone' vibe until you click on them. This is not calming.<p>Frankly I think 'use as little of my attention as possible' should be the major principle, not 'be polite in how you dispose of my attention'
I've seen a genius use of face analysis lately: nvidia new video codec for chat.<p><a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression" rel="nofollow">https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression</a><p>Basically it creates an AI model of your face, send that to the other party, and then when you move, it only sends key face points. The other party uses the AI model to create a virtual hi-res picture of you, thispersondoesnotexist style, except it looks perfectly like you. Then it uses the face points to move it the way you move.<p>The result: it consumes almost no bandwidth and you get the experience of a hi-res video call.<p>Of course, then I realized the trap: it's a perfect honey pot to get everyone to scan their face.<p>This is, IMO, what's going to happen with the VR. Big companies like Facebook/Meta are going to use the online avatar as a motivator to let them scan everything that can identify you. It will make the virtual you so realistic! Scan your face, your cat, your whole flat!<p>People will jump on that, with no thinking about the consequences what so ever. After all, they are crazy about the way services like snapchat can change your face on a video.<p>It's already game over. Like with Ken of the North star, we don't know it, but we are already owned.
Something they talk about a lot on the Vergecast (weekly podcast from The Verge) is that the killer app for AR is identifying people in real life for you. I think that's probably true for a lot of people who have to have a lot of professional in-person interactions with a lot of different people - which importantly includes journalists. They semi-jokingly talk about how they'd forgive many misgivings about a product that could reliably do that. And Facebook seems to be in by far the best position to have the data to build that product, as long as they hang on to their facial recognition data set somewhere.
am curious - what will meta do with shadow profiles? does your shadow-meta just sit idly in the middle of some public space for eternity? do you get vandalized/ridiculed? can your shadow-meta be identified by others? will it use the previous facial recognition data to guide how you look?
If you guys aren't born yesterday, you have realized by now that it's a step by step process.<p>If too much resistence, back away for a few months, then implement it again. The wheel goes round and round.<p>Tech is building our 1984 or brave new world society and there is nothing to be done about it.
Facebook: we're moving away from this ethically and morally reprehensible technology<p><i>under their breath</i> because the IP is better held in a different part of our corporate structure.