Facebook has announced it’s going to stop using its controversial Tag Suggestions feature, and facial recognition technology is going to be available to all of its users, Reuters reported Tuesday (Sept. 3).
Facial recognition tech has been available to a certain number of users since December 2017, and it works by letting users know if a profile photo has been used by another account, or if they’re in photos in which they haven’t been tagged or notified about.
Tag Suggestions, a feature that lets people tag friends, has been controversial. It’s been in the middle of a privacy dispute that resulted in a 2015 lawsuit filed by users in Illinois.
Facebook is accused of breaking the state’s law on biometric activity, called the Biometric Information Privacy Act. The suit said Facebook stored and collected data from millions of users without their permission.
Facebook tried to undo the class action status of the lawsuit, but a federal appeal’s court denied the effort last month.
“We have always disclosed our use of face recognition technology and that people can turn it on or off at any time,” Facebook said in August.
The company also said it works with a number of privacy experts and authorities to help guide how it uses facial recognition software, and how its users get to interact with the technology.
The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Facebook lied to users about handling phone numbers, and it misled users about turning off a photo recognition tool.
The phone number issue concerns Facebook’s two-factor authentication, which allowed users to ask for a one-time password via text when they log onto the site. However, some advertisers had access to the contact details without permission from users.
The FTC also claimed Facebook didn’t tell about 30 million people that they could turn off a facial recognition tool that tagged people in photos.
Those two complaints will be part of the settlement, which will reportedly include a $5 billion fine and the creation of a privacy board meant to provide oversight of Facebook.
Nvidia has launched a series of partnerships designed to boost the healthcare sector via AI.
The collaborations include work with a number of major figures in the $10 trillion healthcare field, the chipmaker announced Monday (Jan. 13) at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
“The convergence of AI, accelerated computing and biological data is turning healthcare into the largest technology industry,” Nvidia said in a news release. “Healthcare leaders IQVIA, Illumina and Mayo Clinic, as well as Arc Institute, are using the latest Nvidia technologies to develop solutions that will help advance human health.”
These solutions include artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can speed clinical trials by reducing administrative burden, AI models that learn from biology instruments to advance drug discovery and digital pathology and physical AI robots for surgery, patient monitoring and operations.
“AI agents, AI instruments and AI robots will help address the $3 trillion of operations dedicated to supporting industry growth and create an AI factory opportunity in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” the company added.
In the case of the Mayo Clinic, the medical center will use Nvidia’s tech to accelerate the development of new pathology foundation models. DNA sequencing and informatics technology provider Illumina, meanwhile, will employ Nvidia accelerated computing and AI toolsets for its multiomics analysis software and workflows.
“This will help make analysis of — and insights from — the human genome more accessible to researchers, pharmaceutical companies and other life sciences customers,” the release said.
The announcement comes one week after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduced several new developments from the company, including next-generation chips, new large language models and a mini AI supercomputer, while also announcing a partnership with Toyota.
“It’s been an extraordinary journey, extraordinary year,” Huang said to a packed crowd during a keynote address at the CES trade show in Las Vegas.
Last year saw Nvidia become one of the world’s most valuable companies in terms of market value. It currently occupies the No. 2 spot, at $3.2 trillion — right below $3.4 trillion Apple.
It was a year, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, that saw AI capabilities move from simple automation to tackle complex tasks in fields like healthcare but also finance and manufacturing.
“By year’s end, tech’s landscape had fundamentally shifted. AI wasn’t just another feature or stock catalyst — it had become the lens through which companies viewed their futures,” that report said. “The question shifted from whether AI would transform business to how companies would harness its potential.”
For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.