Meta Platforms Inc. ["Meta"]

Meta Platforms Inc. ["Meta"] Logo since 2021-10-28.
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Name	Meta Platforms Inc.
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Political position	Right-wing to far-right
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Website	About.Facebook.com

Background

Meta Platforms, Inc., - formerly known as Facebook, Inc. until October 28, 2021-10-28 - is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company based in Menlo Park, California. It is the parent organization of Facebook and its subsidiaries. It is one of the world's most valuable companies and is considered one of the Big Five [Big Tech] companies in U.S. information technology, alongside Amazon.com,   Alphabet  [subsidiary: Google],   Apple, and Microsoft. Meta, Inc. generates the vast majority of its revenue by selling advertisement placements to marketers.

Meta, Inc. offers other products and services, including Facebook Messenger,   Facebook Watch, and Facebook Portal. Meta, Inc. has also acquired Giphy and Mapillary, and has a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms.

In October 2021, following significant negative coverage of Facebook  [Wikipedia entry] for the way its social media platform of the same name operates, media outlets reported that the parent company planned to change its name to "reflect its focus on building the metaverse", it was rebranded as Meta later that month on 2021-10-28. The name "Meta" comes from the Greek language and means "beyond", indicating the futuristic motive.

Additional Reading

Texas sued Facebook parent company Meta for exploiting the biometric data of millions of people in Texas - including those who used the platform and those who did not. Meta, according to a lawsuit  [local copy] filed by state Attorney General Ken Paxton, violated state privacy laws and should be responsible for billions of dollars in damages. The suit involves Facebook's "tag suggestions" feature, which Facebook ended last year, that used facial recognition to encourage users to link the photo to a friend's profile. Paxton alleged Meta collected facial recognition data without their consent, shared it with third parties, and did not destroy the information in a timely manner - all in violation of state law. "The scope of Facebook's misconduct is staggering," the complaint reads. "Facebook repeatedly captured Texans' biometric identifiers without their consent not hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times - but billions of times, all in violation of Capture or Use of Biometric Identifiers Act (CUBI  |  local copy] and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA  |  local copy  |  legislation  |  local copy]." Ken Paxton said at a news conference outside of the Harrison County Courthouse on Monday [2022-02-14] that the fine for each violation of the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act is $25,000.

A Meta spokesperson told NPR "these claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously." Meta shut down  [local copy] its facial recognition feature in 2021-11 after a decade in operation. In a blog post announcing the decision, Jerome Pesenti  [LinkedIn: Jerome Pesenti  |  local copy  |  Facebook profile: Jérôme Pesenti], Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, wrote that Facebook needed "to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules." Meta also said then it would delete the data it held on more than one billion users. Last year, Facebook settled a class action suit brought by users who said their data had been used without their consent for $650 million.

Texas filed suit on Monday [2022-02-14] in a state district court in the small city of Marshall, Texas. It's unclear why the Texas Attorney General's office selected that specific jurisdiction. The state hired two outside law firms to argue the case. "Facebook will no longer take advantage of people and their children with the intent to turn a profit at the expense of one's safety and well-being," Ken Paxton said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. "This is yet another example of Big Tech's deceitful business practices and it must stop."

Regulators in the U.K. on Tuesday [2021-11-30] said they have directed Facebook parent company Meta to sell Giphy after finding "the takeover could reduce competition between social media platforms and increase Facebook's already significant market power."

Why it matters: Facebook agreed to buy  Giphy in May of last year [2020] for an estimated price of $400 million. The deal almost immediately invited antitrust scrutiny, given the increased attention to Facebook's growing market power.

Details: In a statement, the U.K.'s competition and markets authority concluded that the deal would be anticompetitive because Facebook could theoretically increase market power by "denying or limiting other platforms' access to Giphy GIFs," or "changing the terms of access," to its GIFs for competitive sites.

• Regulators also determined that the deal was uncompetitive because it shut down Giphy's advertising business, therefore eliminating Giphy's competition to Facebook's ad business.

• As a result, regulators said Facebook "will also be required to reinstate the innovative advertising services that Giphy offered before the merger."

• Facebook did not immediately return a request for comment.

Be smart: GIFs, or short videos used in conversation online to express reactions, are valuable to social platforms because they increase engagement.

• Google acquired GIF startup Tenor in 2018. That deal was presumably much smaller in scale, which is perhaps why it didn't receive as much regulatory scrutiny.

The big picture: The decision comes amid a period of heightened scrutiny on Facebook and Big Tech for its market power. Lawmakers in the U.S. and around the globe are currently probing Facebook for anticompetitive practices.

Facebook says it will stop using facial recognition for photo-tagging. In 2021-11-02 blog post  [local copy],   Meta Platforms, Inc. - the social network, Facebook's new parent company - announced that the platform will delete the facial templates of more than a billion people and shut off its facial recognition software, which uses an algorithm to identify people in photos they upload to Facebook. This decision represents a major step for the movement against facial recognition, which experts and activists have warned is plagued with bias and privacy problems.

But Meta's announcement comes with a couple of big caveats. While Meta says that facial recognition isn't a feature on Instagram and its Portal devices, the company's new commitment doesn't apply to its metaverse products, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse told Recode. In fact, Meta is already exploring ways to incorporate biometrics into its emerging metaverse business, which aims to build a virtual, internet-based simulation where people can interact as avatars. Meta is also keeping DeepFace  [Wikipedia entry], the sophisticated algorithm that powers its photo-tagging facial recognition feature.

"We believe this technology has the potential to enable positive use cases in the future that maintain privacy, control, and transparency, and it's an approach we'll continue to explore as we consider how our future computing platforms and devices can best serve people's needs," Jason Grosse told Recode. "For any potential future applications of technologies like this, we'll continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data, and how we're living up to our responsible innovation framework."

That facial recognition for photo-tagging is leaving Facebook, also known as the "big blue app," is certainly significant. Facebook originally launched this tool in 2010 to make its photo-tagging feature more popular. The idea was that letting an algorithm automatically suggest tagging a particular person in a photo would make it easier than manually tagging them and, perhaps, encourage more people to tag their friends. The software is informed by the photos people post of themselves, which Facebook uses to create unique facial templates tied to their profiles. The DeepFace artificial intelligence technology, which was developed from pictures uploaded by Facebook users, helps match people's facial templates to faces in different photos.

Privacy experts raised concerns immediately after the feature launched. Since then, pivotal studies from researchers like Joy Buolamwini,   Timnit Gebru, and Deb Raji have also shown that facial recognition can have baked-in racial and gender bias, and is particularly less accurate for women with darker skin. In response to growing opposition to the technology, Facebook made the facial recognition feature opt-in in 2019. The social media network also agreed to pay a $650 million settlement last year [2020] after a lawsuit claimed the tagging tool violated Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act.

[ ... snip ... ]

[Reuters.com, 2021-11-02] Facebook will shut down facial recognition system.

Meta Platforms, Inc.nbsp; [formerly; Facebook, Inc.] announced on Tuesday [2021-11-02] it is shutting down its facial recognition system, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos, citing growing societal concerns about the use of such technology. "Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," Jérôme Pesenti  [Anglicized: Jerome Pesenti  |  local copy] Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Meta, wrote in a 2021-11-02 blog post  [local copy]. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."

The removal of face recognition by the world's largest social media platform comes as the tech industry has faced a reckoning over the past few years over the ethics of using the technology. Critics say facial recognition technology - which is popular among retailers, hospitals and other businesses for security purposes - could compromise privacy, target marginalized groups and normalize intrusive surveillance. IBM has permanently ended facial recognition product sales, and Microsoft Corporation and Amazon.com, Inc. have suspended sales to police indefinitely.

The news also comes as https://www.reuters.com/technology/changing-facebooks-name-will-not-deter-lawmaker-or-regulatory-scrutiny-experts-2021-10-20 has been under intense scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over user safety and a wide range of abuses on its platforms. The company, which last week renamed itself Meta Platforms, Inc., said more than one-third of https://www.reuters.com/technology/changing-facebooks-name-will-not-deter-lawmaker-or-regulatory-scrutiny-experts-2021-10-20's daily active users have opted into the face recognition setting on the social media site, and the change will now delete the "facial recognition templates" of more than 1 billion people.

The removal will roll out globally and is expected to be complete by December 2021, a Facebook spokesperson said.

[ ... snip ... ]

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