> 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.
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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.
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[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...