A year ago, a top Facebook executive running the company’s hardware and virtual reality division approached CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a proposal to add facial recognition to his division’s products.
The executive, Andrew Bosworth, argued that the company’s facial recognition technology — used for a decade to identify and tag people in Facebook photos — could do things like enable the company to identify people in virtual environments with labels that could appear next to their bodies, according to a person familiar with internal matters who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.
Zuckerberg wouldn’t go for it. After years of scandal, the company was aiming to move in a new direction prioritizing encryption and privacy. Already, U.S. states, cities, and countries around the world were adopting privacy laws curbing the use of tools like facial recognition, and other company leaders felt that Facebook should get ahead of them, the person said.
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Source: Facebook’s facial recognition decision spurred by regulation, privacy concerns – The Washington Post
