Three months ago, Mark Zuckerberg was sitting before Congress, promising to change Facebook’s ways. “I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” he said. “It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.” Zuckerberg promised to take privacy concerns more seriously, ensured members of Congress that he was open to regulation (so long as it was the “right regulation”), and pledged to do more to stop bad actors from abusing his platform.

Zuckerberg insisted that this was the beginning of a new chapter in the company’s history. The company would return to its roots as a “village square,” where people shared personal updates and photographs of their loved ones. Shortly after he left Washington, D.C., Facebook began airing national television advertisements in which it apologized for having lost its way.



However successful Zuckerberg’s testimony was as a public relations exercise, it did little to change the real problem. Facebook’s core business model is built around advertising, which means that it will always share its users’ data with advertisers. And, despite the company’s strenuous apologies, it is continuing to push the boundaries of privacy to ensure that its market dominance remains unchallenged. The latest front in that fight is facial recognition.



As The New York Times reported earlier this week, “more than a dozen privacy and consumer groups, and at least a few officials, argue that the company’s use of facial recognition has violated people’s privacy by not obtaining appropriate user consent.” The facial recognition software used by Facebook scans photos uploaded to the social network against a database of “unique templates” of user faces to help recognize them. It does so without alerting the person whose face has been identified or obtaining their consent.



In Europe, which has much more stringent privacy regulations than the United States, Facebook sold its facial recognition software as a tool for privacy protection. “Face recognition technology allows us to help protect you from a stranger using your photo to impersonate you,” the company said. In the U.S., concerns about Facebook’s facial recognition software have been overwhelmed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a Trump-affiliated firm was given access to the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users. But consumer groups asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the company’s use of the technology.

