For someone having trouble remembering a person's name this Facebook app might be a real benefit. But does anyone still trust Facebook?
Kate O'Flaherty tells us this in Forbes -- Facebook Tested A Terrifying Facial Recognition App On Employees And Their Friends. Excerpt:
Facebook is under fire again, and this time over a terrifying facial recognition app that was tested on its employees. According to Business Insider, the tool used real-time facial recognition to identify a person by simply pointing a smartphone’s camera at them.
Business Insider said the app was developed between 2015 and 2016 but has since been discontinued. Citing anonymous sources, it reported that one version of the tool could even bring up someone’s Facebook profile using facial recognition capabilities. It was allegedly tested on Facebook’s employees and their friends who had enabled facial recognition on their profiles.
Facebook has confirmed that it did develop the app, but denied that it could identify users of the social network. CNET published a statement, which read: "As a way to learn about new technologies, our teams regularly build apps to use internally.
The program could have some benefit to individual users. But social media companies are less caring about their users than their customers -- companies and governments wanting to compile dossiers on each us. China and it's social credit scorecard comes to mind.
Americans who grew up during the cyber revolution are much more at ease sharing personal information then those who grew up without it. And some people are more tolerant of snoops than others.
It's still an open question why China purloined U.S. government employee files a few years back. But it's not out of the question that they could be compiling dossiers on each and every one of us.
In any event, it's disturbing to read how cavalier many tech companies are about developing snooping software which will undoubtedly end up in the hands of foreign government agencies.
------
3:22 PM 11/26/2019
Comments