Facebook face recognition app used by employees

Facebook has been under a lot of scrutiny and criticism over privacy concerns over various security issues. This time is no different with it’s Face Recognition app.

This app allowed it’s employees to identify their co-workers and friends using their smartphone camera.

Facebook has said that the app was never used to identify the general public and the app was never released publicly and was only available to its employees.

According to a report by Business Insider, the app was developed somewhere around 2015-2016 and it has now been discontinued.

A company spokesperson said:

As a way to learn about new technologies, our teams regularly build apps to use internally. The app described here were only available to Facebook employees, and could only recognize employees and their friends who had face recognition enabled

Facebook has received criticism in the past over facial recognition. In October, Facebook developed a tool to track and wrongly identify a person in a live video.

There is also a de-identification system that changes key facial features in a live video as well.

A paper has stated about this recently and says:

Face Recognition can lead to loss of privacy and face replacement technology may be misused to create misleading videos

Recent world events concerning advances in, and abuse of face recognition technology invoke the need to understand methods that deal with de-identification. Our contribution is the only one suitable for video, including live video, and presents a quality that far surpasses the literature methods

Facebook is now facing a class-action lawsuit of $35 billion over this facial recognition data in Illinois. We are sure that this won’t be the end of such news related to the company.

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