Facebook’s Push for Facial Recognition Prompts Privacy Alarms -- NYT

Two paragraphs later: "Rochelle Nadhiri, a Facebook spokeswoman, said its system analyzes faces in users’ photos to check whether they match with those who have their facial recognition setting turned on. If the system cannot find a match, she said, it does not identify the unknown face and immediately deletes the facial data." Tangentially, see Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras (NYT)

"Facebook’s push to spread facial recognition also puts the company at the center of a broader and intensifying debate about how the powerful technology should be handled. The technology can be used to remotely identify people by name without their knowledge or consent. While proponents view it as a high-tech tool to catch criminals, civil liberties experts warn it could enable a mass surveillance system.

Facial recognition works by scanning faces of unnamed people in photos or videos and then matching codes of their facial patterns to those in a database of named people. Facebook has said that users are in charge of that process, telling them: “You control face recognition.”

But critics said people cannot actually control the technology — because Facebook scans their faces in photos even when their facial recognition setting is turned off."

Facebook’s Push for Facial Recognition Prompts Privacy Alarms -- NYT