[puttycat]

> They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.

Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.

[dotancohen]

The fine article actually ends with this text:

  > The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."

[Dylan16807]

You don't need to imply they didn't read that part, because it doesn't really affect the point of the comment, that Facebook doesn't actually care about privacy. Even if they're not sharing things willy-nilly, they're still aggressively tracking everyone they can.

[smotched]

just remember even the patriot act started with good intentions, to get justice.

[Aurornis]

Facebook shut down their facial recognition program in 2021 and deleted the data in response to public frustrations.

It’s really sad now to see people getting angry at Facebook not having facial recognition technology.

[itishappy]

The two views aren't necessarily in conflict. I don't appreciate Facebook's use of facial recognition technology, but they built it. I'm extremely disappointed they proceeded to use this technology to influence elections while fighting against making the data available to law enforcement. I understand this may not have been intentional on their part, but the result is the same, and I was not at all surprised by it.

[Beestie]

I can't help but notice the exact wording of FB's response - or rather what they didn't say.

If someone asks me to do them a favor, I have basically three options for a reply:

• I can and I will;

• I can but I won't; or

• I am not able to.

FB's answer was not option 3.

I think a more plausible explanation is that FB did not want to set a precedent of being the facial recog avenue of choice for the Fed.

[garbawarb]

> From that list of 40 or 50 people, it was easy to find and trawl their social media. And that is when they found a photo of Lucy on Facebook with an adult who looked as though she was close to the girl - possibly a relative.

It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.

[defrost]

Facebook did nothing to assist in narrowing a search area.

What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.

It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.

[1024core]

Facial recognition is very powerful these days. My friend took a photo of his kid at the top of Twin Peaks in SF, with the city in the background. Unfortunately, due to the angle, you could barely see the eyes and a portion of the nose of the kid. Android was still able to tag the kid.

I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If FB was concerned about privacy, they could have asked them to get a judicial warrant to perform a broad search.

But they didn't. And Lucy continued to be abused for months after that.

I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.

[Gigachad]

Google photos has the advantage of a limited search space. Any photo you take is overwhelmingly likely to be one of the few faces already in the library. Not to say facebook couldn't solve the problem. But the ability of Google to do facial recognition with such poor inputs is that it's searching on 40~ faces rather than x billion faces.

[Aurornis]

> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here

This story was from more than a decade ago.

Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.

> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.

Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?

[alephnerd]

> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here

This case began being investigated on January 2014 [0], which means abuse began (shudder) in 2012-13 if not earlier.

Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [1] in June 2015 [2]

Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [3] and Image-Based Crowd Counting only began becoming solvable in 2015-16.

> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.

Yes. But it is 2026, not 2014.

> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made

I'm sure there are plenty of amoral choices he can think about, but not solving facial detection until 2015 is probably not one of them.

---

While it feels like mass digital surveillance, social media, and mass penetration of smartphones has been around forever it only really began in earnest just 12 years ago. The past approximately 20 years (iPhone was first released on June 2007 and Facebook only took off in early 2009 after smartphones and mobile internet became normalized) have been one of the biggest leaps in technology in the past century. The only other comparable decades were probably 1917-1937 and 1945-1965.

---

[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/bbc-eye-documentary-t...

[1] - https://research.facebook.com/publications/deepface-closing-...

[2] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-can-recognize-you-just...

[3] - https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/vgg_face/

[__loam]

Facebook rightly retired their facial recognition system in 2021 over concerns about user privacy. Facebook is a social media site, they are not the government or police.

[Onavo]

When people on hacker News talk about requiring cops to do traditional police work instead of doing wide ranging trawls using technology, this is exactly what they meant. I hope you don't complain when the future you want becomes reality and the three letter agencies come knocking down your door just because you happened to be in the same building as a crime in progress and the machine learning algorithms determined your location via cellular logs and labelled you as a criminal.

[EagnaIonat]

The EU AI act activates this year. Facial recognition is in the restrictive list. You don't want to give auditors ammunition before it goes live as top fine would cost FB around $4B, and wouldn't be a one time fine.

Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.

[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)

[belorn]

I would hazard a guess that the facial recognition will limit the search scope to people associated (to some degree) with your friends account and some threshold of metrics gathered from the image. I doubt it is using a broad search.

With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.

Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.

[LightBug1]

Facebook carried a ball?

I'm willing to bet said ball was kicked into the jungle five seconds after registering the domain.

[DangitBobby]

It seems to me that the BBC is including those passages at the beginning and end of their story as propaganda so the public begs (demands, even) for more surveillance, and the sale of private data to the government. I mean, think of the children, like Lucy! Seems to be having that effect in this thread, in any case.

[christoph]

It’s absolutely propaganda and a perfect example of how the public gets manipulated on a daily basis. Let’s break down the facts:

- Pushes for facial recognition

- Pushes for more state run surveillance

- Pushes for AI based surveillance

- Pushes for greater data collection, access & mining

- Legitimises it all under the classic “save the kids” meme and pushes emotionally hard for more.

The main issues i’ve seen discussed on HN the last couple of months have been critical of the never ending and increasing government surveillance. Both sides of the pond. This is their answer.

Simultaneously we’re hearing about how almost anybody and everybody beyond a level of power was well aware of industial level sex trafficking and abuse, and either totally turned a blind eye or joined in.

The article might carry some weight if it wasn’t from an authoritarian state backed organisation that’s very well known for covering up for, and protecting multiple famous high level sexual criminals within it’s own organisation, spanning multiple decades, that has never faced any real audit, investigation or justice for its own crimes.