The facial recognition feature is how I figured out someone was doxxing and harassing me on their page. Getting the notification that it thinks I appeared in a photo they had ripped from my FB profile was the tip off. I have mixed feelings.
People are more motivated to comment when they're upset about something, so it ends up looking like everyone here hates everything big tech does, when it may be that a small number of people hate decision X, a small number of people hate decision Y, and most people either like them or don't care.
You often hear complaints that big tech drives people to extreme viewpoints through algorithms. But the natural human algorithm of putting more effort into the negative than the positive seems to lead to the same outcome.
Individual pieces of feedback can be valuable, but if you let it do the driving then you can end up making changes that worsen your product. You become subject to the will of the most vocal critics at any given moment.
A useful concept for people to remember as it applies everywhere. Particularly as we get drawn into tribal politics, it would be better for people to remember that the opposition is not uniform and consists of many different viewpoints. For someone who wants to be divisive, it is trivial to cherry pick examples of bad behavior ("hypocritical") by pretending that those you disagree with must all share exactly the same priorities and opinions.
To provide a personal anecdote; I don't like using Microsoft products and always look for an open-source, unixy replacement when at home. I complain about Microsoft (products, economy, & policy) at almost every opportunity. And in the same breath I will wholeheartedly recommend the same Microsoft product that I personally wouldn't use to a client in need. The ubiquity and quality of Microsoft products is too significant to ignore. If I were to recommend one of my neckbeard alternatives I would certainly get support calls about it all the time.
But if you only ever went by my social media posts you would think I absolutely hate Microsoft and vehemently refuse to use their products. That's not the case. I just don't get excited enough about Microsoft as a business to go parroting their marketing and waving their flag. The good balances the bad enough that I stay with the brand, but human negativity bias still exists and I've got to complain. The product is too ubiquitous to ignore.
At the time, facial recognition was almost sci-fi levels of absurd to envision, especially at scale. Nowadays, anyone can do their own facial recognition on laptop-level GPUs from freely-available open source software and every site that can use it, probably does use it in some form.
It's a lot more normalized now than it was.
You're distilling your impressions from thousands of people into a single sentence, and then you're taking a single person's response and using that to push your agenda that "people just love to hate big tech". It's fascinating that you think this is a valid observation on your part.
If the only use of facial recognition on Facebook were to track how one's own image is used I don't think many people would be upset. But allowing someone else to find every image one appears in is a different and scarier thing.
Or, maybe companies have proven again and again and again and again and again that not only can they not be trusted with your data, but they don't secure it, because profits.
They could have implemented in the account settings somewhere where you can let it alert you for any such usage of your face, but without it doing any auto-tagging or other publicly visible things which we usually complain about.
What would you do if you think that somebody who harassed, and doxed you were working at Facebook, or Google?