-
The meeting comes in the wake of the unveiling of new EU rules governing data and artificial intelligence (AI) - including facial recognition.
-
Facebook is facing regulatory challenges with EU authorities, with increasing public scrutiny over their data practices in Europe.
-
As per some media reports, the EU could go as far as a temporary ban on the use of facial recognition, which might impact Facebook's business.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on Monday, met with the EU competition chief in Brussels. The meeting comes in the wake of the unveiling of new EU rules governing data and artificial intelligence (AI) - including facial recognition, which might .
Zuckerberg discussed the EU's digital agenda with Margrethe Vestager, EU competition chief and Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market, after the Facebook’s chief called for specific regulation when it comes to elections, , privacy, and data portability.
"Even if I'm not going to agree with every regulation in the near term, I do think it's going to be the kind of thing that builds trust and better governance of the internet, and will benefit everyone, including us, over the long term."
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook
Meanwhile, the EU has described Zuckerberg's proposals as .
“He has been looking at four different areas, he has been talking about things like election integrity, trying to avoid, I think, looking at the competition and the taxation aspects, which are probably the most expensive.”
- Seth Wallis-Jones, Principal Analyst, Omdia
EU's executive arm, the European Commission is set to unveil new regulations on artificial intelligence (AI) on Wednesday.
READ MORE:
Staring at a Temporary Ban on Facial Recognition
The social media platform has rapidly evolved from a platform that enables ubiquitous communication between people to a highly-valuable database of information about its 2.9bn users worldwide - of which 286m is based in Europe. Thus, the EU lawmakers have been asking Facebook to increase its transparency efforts and to comply with EU rules.
Facebook is facing regulatory challenges with EU authorities, with increasing public scrutiny over their data practices in Europe - especially since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force.
Last week, the social media platform failed to provide information in a privacy-review process, thus failing to launch its new dating app in Europe. And it is already facing investigations by the EU for leveraging its access to users' data and market dominance, as well as for its proposed digital currency Libra.
Now, as per some media reports, the EU could go as far as a temporary ban on the use of facial recognition. Facebook is one of many U.S. tech giants that have invested in A.I. Zuckerberg’s firm recently acquired the British A.I. company Deeptide and the London-based computer vision start-up .
Facebook's use of artificial intelligence has seen a steep increase since the launch of its Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) group back in 2013. It is using AI to govern the type of content that appears in user's news feed and to power the ad-targeting system that makes Facebook's billions - but also to help prevent suicides, to spot nudity in images, and to flag fake news.
The head of Facebook's applied machine learning group Joaquin Quiñonero Candela even went on to say, "Facebook today cannot exist without AI".
Meanwhile, other tech giants like Google and Amazon are also under similar pressure from the EU as well as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC said last week it would be examining prior acquisitions by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Though these acquisitions are not anti-competitive on their own, if you look at pattern-behavior maybe it does build them into something bigger, said Wallis-Jones.
READ MORE: