Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
> The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."It’s really sad now to see people getting angry at Facebook not having facial recognition technology.
If someone asks me to do them a favor, I have basically three options for a reply:
• I can and I will;
• I can but I won't; or
• I am not able to.
FB's answer was not option 3.
I think a more plausible explanation is that FB did not want to set a precedent of being the facial recog avenue of choice for the Fed.
It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.
What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.
It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.
All Facebook likely did here that was any different than any other social media platform would have done, was gather Sandberg, Zuck and a cadre of snotty, sniveling engineers in a conference room and debate whether this was good engagement for the platform.
I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If FB was concerned about privacy, they could have asked them to get a judicial warrant to perform a broad search.
But they didn't. And Lucy continued to be abused for months after that.
I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
This story was from more than a decade ago.
Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
People decide who they think are the good guys and who they think are the bad guys first, then view subsequent events through that lens.
This case began being investigated on January 2014 [0], which means abuse began (shudder) in 2012-13 if not earlier.
Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [1] in June 2015 [2]
Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [3] and Image-Based Crowd Counting only began becoming solvable in 2015-16.
> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.
Yes. But it is 2026, not 2014.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made
I'm sure there are plenty of amoral choices he can think about, but not solving facial detection until 2015 is probably not one of them.
---
While it feels like mass digital surveillance, social media, and mass penetration of smartphones has been around forever it only really began in earnest just 12 years ago. The past approximately 20 years (iPhone was first released on June 2007 and Facebook only took off in early 2009 after smartphones and mobile internet became normalized) have been one of the biggest leaps in technology in the past century. The only other comparable decades were probably 1917-1937 and 1945-1965.
---
[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/bbc-eye-documentary-t...
[1] - https://research.facebook.com/publications/deepface-closing-...
[2] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-can-recognize-you-just...
No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.
Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.
Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.
[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)
With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.
Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.
I'm willing to bet said ball was kicked into the jungle five seconds after registering the domain.
- Pushes for facial recognition
- Pushes for more state run surveillance
- Pushes for AI based surveillance
- Pushes for greater data collection, access & mining
- Legitimises it all under the classic “save the kids” meme and pushes emotionally hard for more.
The main issues i’ve seen discussed on HN the last couple of months have been critical of the never ending and increasing government surveillance. Both sides of the pond. This is their answer.
Simultaneously we’re hearing about how almost anybody and everybody beyond a level of power was well aware of industial level sex trafficking and abuse, and either totally turned a blind eye or joined in.
The article might carry some weight if it wasn’t from an authoritarian state backed organisation that’s very well known for covering up for, and protecting multiple famous high level sexual criminals within it’s own organisation, spanning multiple decades, that has never faced any real audit, investigation or justice for its own crimes.