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Facial Recognition: Why Facebook’s ‘Alt Text’ Feature Can be Abused by Spooks & Hackers
from Sputnik News:
Facebook’s “automatic alternative text” feature silently implemented by the IT giant on its social media platforms may be used to track users and could potentially be abused by hackers and intelligence agencies, say cyber security experts, suggesting that EU authorities may roast the tech giant for violating the bloc’s data protection rules.
Massive outage and loading problems have unexpectedly revealed that Facebook’s AI is adding a text description to every photo posted on its social media platforms, including Instagram.
According to Facebook, this feature, called an “automatic alternative (alt) text” uses “object recognition technology to create a description of a photo for the blind and vision-loss community”.
Cyber security experts, however, believe that there is more to the tech giant’s software than meets the eye.
Facebook Uses Facial Recognition AI for Data Mining, Advertising & Tracking of Users
“There are many purposes, text versions of the images are used to increase the user experience of the platform, for example, they can be used to make the site accessible to people are unable to see the images (i.e. blind people or partially sighted)”, explains Pierluigi Paganini, CTO at Cybaze and member of ENISA ETL group. “Another scenario sees the use of AI-based systems in order to identify people in the picture and use the collected information to build a graph of relationship for a person of interest. These graphs could be used for advertising purposes, but we cannot ignore that potential abuses could open the door to surveillance”.
According to Paganini, the latter scenario is particularly disturbing because Facebook’s alt text feature “could be abused by intelligence agencies and law enforcement for dragnet surveillance”.
Charles R. Smith, CEO Software Inc expert and encryption security programmer, elaborated that “the system appears to an automated photo tag programme, providing text content to describe the picture for other programmes which do text based data mining”.
“Facebook already has the facial recognition system in place and is currently using it for data mining, advertising and tracking of users”, he said. “Expect law enforcement agencies (and intelligence agencies) to obtain access to Facebook’s database – either via the courts or illegally by hacking”.
Smith believes that the technology could be used for various purposes: one of them is censorship, but a more likely use is “tracking”. According to the programmer, although Facebook currently appears to be uninterested in the political applications and is just making money on advertisement, it may one day weaponise this feature “against dissidents or political opponents”.
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