San Francisco: Battling several privacy issues, Facebook experimented with a face recognition app among its employees that allowed them to identify their colleagues and friends by pointing Smartphone cameras at them.
The app was developed between 2015 and 2016 but has since been discontinued.
“As a way to learn about new technologies, our teams regularly build apps to use internally. The app described here were only available to Facebook employees, and could only recognise employees and their friends who had face recognition enabled,” a company spokesperson told on Friday.
The app shows that Facebook was experimenting with features that could heighten the anxiety of people worried about abuses of privacy. It was built before the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, which has sparked more scrutiny about whether Facebook is doing enough to safeguard the privacy of its users. Cambridge Analytica, a UK political consultancy, harvested the data from up to 87 million Facebook users without their consent. Following the scandal, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook a record $5 billion for its alleged privacy mishaps.
