June 18, 2012. Facebook acquires a company located in Tel Aviv, called Face.com, which had developed a facial recognition platform to identify images on the web and mobile applications. The Israeli company was able to label, before being acquired by the Social Network of Zuckerberg, more than 18,000 million faces.
Almost at the same time as Face.com, Facebook buys FacioMetrics, which developed a system that applies advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze face images in mobile applications, and even in the identification of the emotions they convey . With the FacioMetrics software you can know if the user is sad or happy when taking a photograph and analyzing the different parameters of the human face.
FacioMetrics was created within Carnegie Mellon University, and developed artificial vision and machine learning algorithms capable of detecting seven different emotions on people's faces through their photos.
With these two acquisitions, Face.com and FacioMetrics, and some more like Masquerade, Facebook develops DeepFace, a facial recognition system combined with deep learning or deep learning. With DeepFace, which uses a 9-layer neural network and 120 million connections, Facebook is able to identify human faces in digital images. The system has 97% accuracy, compared to 85% of the image recognition system used by the FBI.
DeepFace not only connects a person's face with their name, but can literally find a needle in a haystack and find a face in an image that contains thousands of different faces. According to experts, the human brain is only 28 percent more accurate than the facial recognition program developed by Facebook from the companies it acquired.
Facebook is far from being the only company that has ventured to recognize its users with facial recognition. So do Apple, Google, Samsung. Microsoft or Huawei, for example. And what you have to ask yourself is what is the true purpose of requiring users to accept and authorize the recognition of their faces.
Facebook has already faced resistance to DeepFace. In Europe it was forbidden, but since mid-April users of the Social Network are asked if they want to authorize facial recognition when they open their feed. And from here arise the questions of the users, when the scandal of Cambridge Analytica is still very recent that has taken Zuckerberg to the United States Congress to give explanations about the cession of data of millions of clients to third companies.
Where are the data of the faces recognized by DeepFace stored? Who can access them? What does Facebook do with its clients' images? Does facial recognition work only when Facebook is open or also when other applications are open? Could facial recognition be used to identify someone who participates in a legal protest? Surely Facebook is able to answer them and reassure their customers, if they are not.
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