At a glance.
- Facebook backs away from facial recognition.
- Iranian hacking group releases PII on Israelis in two incidents.
The House of Zuckerberg forswears facial recognition.
Meta Platforms Inc., the company formerly known as "Facebook," has said it will shut down its facial recognition system and delete its associated data. More than a billion people's faces are said, according to the Wall Street Journal, to have been collected by Facebook. The company's vice president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, wrote on Meta's blog:
"We’re shutting down the Face Recognition system on Facebook. People who’ve opted in will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos and we will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.
"This change will also impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), which creates image descriptions for blind and visually-impaired people. After this change, AAT descriptions will no longer include the names of people recognized in photos but will function normally otherwise.
"We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules."
The move is regarded as an accommodation of privacy advocates' concerns. The company had promoted the benefits, notably ease-of-use, facial recognition provided its customers.
Black Shadow releases personal information on Israelis.
The Black Shadow group, an Iranian ransomware group operating typically against Israeli targets, yesterday released two sets of information taken from Israeli sources, ET CIO reports. The first tranche of data was taken from Atraf, an LGTBQ dating and nightlife site, and included users' names, locations, and HIV status. The Times of Israel quoted Black Shadow's note announcing its posting of the data to Telegram: “48 hours ended! Nobody send us money. This is not the end, we have more plan.”
The other data, ET CIO says, came from the Machon Mor medical institute, and included the personal information, appointments and test results of about 290,000 individuals.