Ohio's largest public pension system filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the social media giant misled investors and breached the public's trust. From a report: Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, which manages $125 billion on behalf of 1.1 million Ohioans, says it purchased Facebook stock "at artificially inflated prices" in 2021 and suffered damages because of Facebook's violations of federal securities laws. "Defendants were aware that Facebook's platforms facilitate dissension, illegal activity, and violent extremism, and cause significant harm to users, especially children, but Facebook refused to correct these issues," the federal lawsuit alleges. "All told, these disclosures erased more than $100 billion in shareholder value and subjected Facebook to immense reputational harm." The lawsuit comes after former Facebook project manager Frances Haugen testified before Congress that the company "put their astronomical profits before people."

Tonight CNBC interviewed science fiction luminary Neal Stephenson about his new "geoengineering climate change thriller" — and about his coining of the original term "metaverse." Author Neal Stephenson shot to fame almost 30 years ago with the science-fiction novel "Snow Crash," which envisioned a future dominated by mega-corporations and organized crime, competing for dominance in both the real world and the "metaverse," a computer-generated world accessible through virtual reality headsets. Since then, he's written several more novels encompassing technology and history, including a trilogy set at the dawn of the scientific revolution, and has done work for various technology companies including Jeff Bezos' space travel company, Blue Origin, and augmented reality company Magic Leap.

His new novel, "Termination Shock," out November 16, focuses on the looming issue of our age — human-generated climate change, projecting a near future of extreme weather and social chaos. Against this setting, a maverick oilman decides to take matters into his own hands and builds the world's biggest gun to shoot canisters of sulfur dioxide into the air, echoing the effects of a volcanic eruption and temporarily cooling parts of the globe. Geopolitics, social media and Dutch royalty all play a part.

Stephenson acknowledges that geoengineering is a radical step, but suggests as the effects of climate change grow more destructive, the demand for radical solutions will grow.
In the interview Stephenson suggests one factor that might increase popular support for climate-change action: rising sea levels. "You can be as ideological as you want. But you can't argue with the fact that your house is full of water."

The interview also touches on how it was 1992 when Stephenson coined the word "metaverse," and now it's being claimed by major tech companies. "All I can do is kind of sit back and watch it in amazement," Stephenson tells CNBC: But, as many have noticed, "There's a pretty big gap between what Facebook is actually doing, like running Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram, and the visions that they're talking about for the metaverse."
Neil Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot readers back in 2004...

The technology site Recode interviewed 12 "leading thinkers and leaders on Facebook today," including the Senator pushing tech-industry updates for U.S. antitrust law, an early researcher on viral misinformation, and a now-critical former Facebook executive. "[M]ost believe that Facebook can be fixed, or at least that some of its issues are possible to improve..." Their ideas are wide-ranging, with some more ambitious and unexpected than others. But common themes emerge in many of their answers that reveal a growing consensus about what Facebook needs to change and a few different paths that regulators and the company itself could take to make it happen:

- Antitrust enforcement. Facebook isn't just Facebook but, under the Meta umbrella, also Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus. And several experts Recode interviewed believe that forcing Facebook to spin off these businesses would defang it of its concentrated power, allow smaller competitors to arise, and challenge the company to do better by offering customers alternatives for information and communication.

- Create a federal agency to oversee social media, like the Food and Drug Administration. The social media industry has no dedicated oversight agency in the U.S. the way that other industries do, despite its growing power and influence in society. That's why some people we interviewed advocated for making a new agency — or at least increasing funding for the existing FTC — so that it could regulate safety standards on the internet the same way the FDA does for food and pharmaceutical drugs.

- Change Facebook's leadership. Facebook's problems are almost synonymous with the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg, who has unilaterally controlled the company he started in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. Many interviewees believe that for any meaningful change to happen, Facebook needs an executive shake-up, starting from the very top... some experts Recode interviewed suggested that Facebook executives should be criminally prosecuted for either misleading business partners or downplaying human harms their company causes.
The experts also want reforms on the safety-from-prosecution shields of Section 230 "in a way that won't run into First Amendment challenges," and also increased transparency from social media companies about problematic content.

"Some of the experts interviewed by Recode argued that Facebook and other social media companies should be legally required to share certain internal data with vetted researchers about what information is circulating on their platforms."

"When comparing Meta — formerly Facebook — and Microsoft's approaches to the metaverse, it's clear Microsoft has a much more grounded and realistic vision," argues an analyst at data analytics/consultancy company GlobalData: Meta is set to grab a large portion of the $51 billion revenues from VR that GlobalData expects will be generated by 2030. Facebook led the consumer VR headsets market in 2020 and registered 255 VR-related patents between 2016 and 2020. And, as Meta, the company also plans to launch an enterprise-grade headset in Q4 2021. However, VR hardware and software have not been widely adopted. This is attributable to several issues, including latency, nausea, high prices, privacy concerns, and a lack of compelling content. While technologies such as 5G, cloud services, and motion tracking should help to address latency and nausea issues, improving content and developing effective data privacy practices will be paramount for VR's success (more on data privacy in a moment). For these reasons VR is not yet ready to take on the task of the metaverse.

Microsoft seems to have understood better than Meta how people actually use technology. All you need to use Mesh — Microsoft's so-called gateway to the metaverse — is your current smartphone or laptop. No clunky headsets or expensive tech setups are needed. With this approach, Microsoft is keeping its focus on available capabilities and enterprise applications over Meta's vision of total lifestyle adoption. Microsoft Teams also currently has over 145 million daily active users, whereas the total cumulative installed base of VR headsets is less than 17 million. From these numbers alone, Mesh for Microsoft Teams has a possible user base of more than eight times the number of users Meta could hope to reach with its VR headsets.
Facebook's promises of protecting data's privacy in the metaverse "will not be enough to reassure most future users," the article argues.

"Microsoft, on the other hand, is a market leader in data privacy and, when ranked by the 10 themes that matter most to the social media industry, is in second place overall, according to GlobalData's Social Media Thematic Scorecard. Meta is ranked 21st overall out of 35 companies on the scorecard, and its activity with regards to data privacy will be highly detrimental to its future performance."

Besides new issues like hyper-personalized ads, the metaverse will still face the old problem of content moderation, the article suggests — only now spread across a massive scale. And the article ultimately argues that "The metaverse will suffer from the same issues that plague the current version of the internet unless the right actions are taken by those that end up with control..."

Microsoft's better position as a future leader in the metaverse "comes with responsibilities, and Microsoft needs to be prepared to face them...."

An anonymous reader shares the results of a new poll (PDF) from CNN, adding: "Facebook should be treated like cigarettes." From the report: Roughly three-quarters of adults believe Facebook is making American society worse, a new CNN poll (PDF) conducted by SSRS finds [...]. Americans say, 76% to 11%, that Facebook makes society worse, not better, according to the survey. Another 13% say it has no effect either way. That broadly negative appraisal holds across gender, age and racial lines. Even frequent Facebook users -- those who report using the site at least several times a week -- say 70% to 14% that the social network harms, rather than helps, US society. Although majorities across parties say Facebook is doing more harm than good, that feeling spikes among Republicans (82%).

Among the majority overall who think Facebook is worsening society, however, there's less of an overwhelming consensus on whether or not the platform itself is primarily to blame: 55% say that the way some people use Facebook is more at fault, with 45% saying it's more due to the way Facebook itself is run. Overall, about one-third of the public -- including 44% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats -- say both that Facebook is making American society worse and that Facebook itself is more at fault than its users.

Alphabet unit Google lost an appeal against a 2.42-billion-euro ($2.8-billion) antitrust decision on Wednesday, a major win for Europe's competition chief in the first of three court rulings central to the EU push to regulate big tech. From a report: Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager fined the world's most popular internet search engine in 2017 over the use of its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals. The shopping case was the first of three decisions that saw Google rack up 8.25 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade. The company could face defeats in appeals against the other two rulings involving its Android mobile operating system and AdSense advertising service, where the EU has stronger arguments, antitrust specialists say. The court's support for the Commission in its latest ruling could also strengthen Vestager's hand in her investigations into Amazon, Apple and Facebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Just outside of Shiprock, New Mexico, on land belonging to the Navajo Nation, a Bitcoin mine owned and operated by a Canadian investment company consumes seven megawatts of power each month -- enough to power 19,600 homes. The operation is run by a firm called WestBlock Capital and mines between 23 and 25 bitcoins per month, equivalent to roughly $1.4 to $1.6 million USD, with a majority of its power coming from renewable solar energy. According to a press release from the mine's parent company, Luxxfolio, the mine accesses these resources "at significantly reduced cost in the bottom decile of global power costs."

But all around the mine, Dine -- citizens of the Navajo Nation -- live without electricity or running water in their homes. The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA), the nation's non-profit utility enterprise that initially partnered with Calgary, Alberta blockchain company WestBlock on the mine project, is working to connect more homes on the nation to basic utilities. A short documentary detailing the project by Bitcoin mining hosting company Compass was released last week, framing the mine as a means to achieve sovereignty and economic prosperity for the nation. But some Dine are bristling at the idea of a foreign Bitcoin mining company getting access to dirt cheap electricity while residents in Navajo Nation live without basic utilities like power and running water.

Tyler Puente, who commented on a since-deleted Facebook post from Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez's Facebook page about the mine's groundbreaking ceremony that Navajo leadership are allowing outsiders to take advantage of Dine, told Motherboard that he sees the Bitcoin mine as a form of "financial colonialism." "I think Bitcoin companies prey on communities like my own," said Puente. "My perspective is that we're being used." To some Dine, WestBlock project resembles a form of crypto-colonialism, a term that describes the exploitation of lands and resources by cryptocurrency and blockchain interests, often under the guise of progressive or egalitarian rhetorics for the host communities.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has introduced a companion to a Senate bill that would let people use algorithm-free versions of tech platforms, according to a copy of the text shared exclusively with Axios. From the report: Recent revelations about Facebook's internal research findings have renewed lawmaker interest in bills that seek to give people more of a say in how algorithms shape their online experiences. The bill shows that anger over how platforms use their algorithms to target users with specialized content is a bipartisan issue with momentum on Capitol Hill. The algorithms that personalize content on social networks and other apps can make services addictive, violate users' privacy and promote extremism, critics and many lawmakers argue. Conservatives have also claimed that services deliberately censor their speech.

The Filter Bubble Transparency Act would require internet platforms to let people use a version of their services where content selections are not driven by algorithms. It's sponsored by Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Burgess Owens (R-Utah). The Senate version of the bill, also bipartisan, is sponsored by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), an influential member of Republican leadership. Buck and Cicilline are the bipartisan duo responsible for passing six antitrust bills out of the House Judiciary committee in June. Buck and Thune plan to work together on tech and antitrust issues going forward, a Republican aide told Axios. That could boost the chances of such bills passing muster with Senate Republicans in the future.

At its fall 2021 GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia unveiled Riva Custom Voice, a new toolkit that the company claims can enable customers to create custom, "human-like" voices with only 30 minutes of speech recording data. From a report: According to Nvidia, businesses can use Riva Custom Voice to develop a virtual assistant with a unique voice, while call centers and developers can leverage it to launch brand voices and apps to support people with speech and language disabilities. Brand voices like Progressive's Flo are often tasked with recording phone trees and elearning scripts in corporate training video series. For companies, the costs can add up -- one source pegs the average hourly rate for voice actors at $39.63, plus additional fees for interactive voice response (IVR) prompts. Synthesization could boost actors' productivity by cutting down on the need for additional recordings, potentially freeing the actors up to pursue more creative work -- and saving businesses money in the process. For example, Progressive used AI to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot with the voice of Stephanie Courtney, who plays Flo. KFC in Canada built a voice in a Southern U.S. English accent for the chain's ambassador, Colonel Sanders, in the company's Amazon Alexa app. Duolingo is employing AI to create voices for characters in its language learning apps. And National Australia Bank has deployed an AI-powered Australian English voice for the customers who call into its contact centers.

Advanced Micro Devices said Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is becoming a user of its server processors, further eroding Intel's hold on that lucrative market. From a report: Meta will use AMD Epyc processors in its data center computers, the two companies said Monday at an event. AMD also unveiled a new version of that chip with extra memory, which Microsoft Corp. will use in an offering from its Azure cloud computing service. The chipmaker also showed off a new graphics chip for artificial intelligence workloads and gave hints about its next generation of processors coming in 2022. The addition of Meta, the world's largest social media company, to AMD's customer list means it now supplies all the top operators of the giant computing networks that run the internet. Winning those major spenders was part of Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su's plan to resurrect AMD and have it reach market share levels it had only briefly flirted with amid years of struggling to keep up with Intel.

UPDATED: Earlier this week ZDNet reported that Facebook's parent company Meta "has granted the Kazakhstan government direct access to its content reporting system," as part of a joint agreement to work on removing content that is deemed harmful on social network platforms like Facebook and Instagram," with the agreement focusing on protecting children.

But the Washington Post clarified tonight that in fact Kazakhstan's statement "was apparently released independent of Facebook." Meta spokesman Ben McConaghy said in an email that the company has "a dedicated online channel for governments around the world to report content to us that they believe violates local law."

"We follow a consistent global process to assess individual requests — independent from any government — in line with Facebook's policies, local laws and international human rights standards," he added. "This process is the same in Kazakhstan as it is for other countries around the world."
Here's ZDNet's original report: In a joint statement, the Ministry of Information and Social Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the social media giant said the agreement, which is the first of its kind in Central Asia, would help increase the efficiency and effectiveness to counter the spread of illegal content. Giving the Kazakhstan government access to its content reporting system will allow the government to report content that may violate Facebook's global content policy and local content laws in Kazakhstan, Facebook said. Under the agreement, both parties will also set up regular communication, including having an authorised representative from Facebook's regional office work with the Ministry on various policy issues.

"Facebook is delighted to work with the government of Kazakhstan together, particularly in the aspect of online safety for children," Facebook regional public policy director George Chen said in a statement.

Peloton, the makers of an internet-connected exercise bike, saw their stock price drop 35% overnight on Thursday, reports CNBC. "At least four Wall Street investment firms downgraded the stock following Peloton's dismal fiscal first-quarter financial report... Peloton's stock has fallen 63% year to date."

The company had cut its annual revenue forecast — by $1 billion — and lowered its projections for both profit margins and paying subscribers. Bloomberg reports: At best, Peloton currently expects to have 3.45 million connected fitness subscriptions by the end of the fiscal year. It had previously called for 3.63 million. And gross profit margin will be 32%, compared with an earlier forecast of 34%. All that will add up to a loss of as much as $475 million, excluding some items....

On a more upbeat note, the company hinted that it plans to launch new products in the coming weeks and months. Peloton has been working on a rowing machine and a heart-rate monitor that attaches to a wearer's arm, Bloomberg News has reported.
The article suggests Peloton's business was hurt by the end of lockdowns, supply-chain constraints, and the cost of freight. But they also point out another factor. "Like several other companies, Peloton also blamed Apple Inc.'s ad-related privacy changes, which have made it more difficult to target shoppers based on their interests." Apple's new Ad Tracking Transparency feature (or "ATT") now first asks users to deny or allow apps to track their activity for the targeted advertising which had apparently been boosting Peloton's business.

And tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) tipped us off to a larger trend, since Gizmodo reports that Peloton "isn't the only company that has pointed accusingly at Apple lately." When reporting its third quarter earnings at the end of October, Facebook (now called Meta) — which depends on targeted ads for almost 98% of its revenue — said that ATT had decreased the accuracy of its ad targeting. The feature also increased "the cost of driving outcomes" for advertisers, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explained, and made it harder to measure those outcomes. "Overall, if it wasn't for Apple's iOS 14 changes, we would have seen positive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth," Sandberg said.

On Sunday, the Financial Times reported that ATT had cost Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an estimated $9.85 billion in lost revenue in the second half of this year. That's an 87% increase year over year.

A week on from its Connect conference, Meta is moving ahead with rebranding the Oculus Quest 2 as the Meta Quest 2. UploadVR reports: In last week's keynote, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Meta is the new corporate company name for Facebook. Almost all individual services under the company's umbrella, including Whatapp, Instagram and the actual Facebook social platform itself will keep their names. But, just after the keynote, Meta's Andrew Bosworth revealed that the Oculus brand covering VR products and services would start to be switched out with Meta branding. Bosworth explained that "you'll start to see the shift from Oculus Quest from Facebook to Meta Quest and Oculus App to Meta Quest App over time." Turns out "over time" was just over a week -- the Meta Quest 2 branding is already featured prominently in a new blog post on the official Oculus webpage. Confused yet?

The post outlines a new installation at Downtown Disney District at the Disneyland Resort showcasing Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy's Edge on the "Meta Quest 2." Promotional art for the installation seen above also carries the Meta Quest 2 logo despite the fact that the Oculus icon is front and center of the art. Unfortunately, we can't make out if the logo on the Quest headset itself is for Oculus or Meta. But if you try and buy a Quest 2 at the top of the same page, it's still branded as the Oculus Quest 2 for now.

Two U.S. senators have introduced bipartisan legislation that seeks to make it harder for Amazon and other tech giants to make acquisitions. From a report: The office of Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, said on Friday that she and Republican Tom Cotton had introduced a bill targeting such companies as Alphabet's Google and Facebook. The bill would make it easier for the government to stop deals it believes break antitrust law by requiring the companies to prove to a judge that the deals are good for competition, and therefore legal. A similar bill, introduced by Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries and others, has been approved in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee and awaits a vote by the full House. Traditionally it is up to the government in antitrust enforcement to show a particular transaction would cause prices to rise or is illegal for other reasons. "We're increasingly seeing companies choose to buy their rivals rather than compete," Klobuchar said in a statement. "This bipartisan legislation will put an end to those anticompetitive acquisitions by making it more difficult for dominant digital platforms to eliminate their competitors and enhance the platform's market power."

Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From the report: These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. They were perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social-media platform, which all seek to keep users coming back, the documents show. A Facebook team focused on user well-being suggested a range of fixes, and the company implemented some, building in optional features to encourage breaks from social media and to dial back the notifications that can serve as a lure to bring people back to the platform. Facebook shut down the team in late 2019. A company spokeswoman said Facebook in recent months has begun formulating a new effort to address what it calls problematic use alongside other well-being concerns, such as body image and mental health. The company has been public about its desire to address these problems, said Dani Lever, the spokeswoman, in a statement. Some people have struggles with other technologies, including television and smartphones, she said.

The suit, filed by the now defunct photo start-up Phhhoto, accused the social network of stalling on a deal and then putting it out of business. From a report: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, downloaded a popular new app, Phhhoto, on Aug. 8, 2014, and took a selfie. Other Facebook executives and product managers soon followed suit. The social network then made overtures to integrate Phhhoto. But the interest of Facebook's top executives in Phhhoto was just a show, according to a lawsuit filed on Thursday in the Eastern District of New York by the start-up, which is now defunct. Instead, Facebook simply wanted to squash the competition, according to the suit, which accused the company of antitrust violations. In the suit, Phhhoto's founders -- Champ Bennett, Omar Elsayed and Russell Armand -- claim that after Mr. Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives downloaded their app and approached them about a partnership, no deal materialized. Facebook instead launched a competing product that mirrored Phhhoto's features. Facebook also suppressed Phhhoto's content within its photo-sharing app, Instagram, the suit says.

Phhhoto is represented by Gary L. Reback, a well-known lawyer. In the 1990s, Mr. Reback persuaded the Justice Department to sue Microsoft for violating antitrust laws, a case that Microsoft ultimately settled in 2001. Phhhoto's suit seeks unspecified monetary damages from Facebook. The lawsuit stands out because of Mr. Zuckerberg's personal involvement, Mr. Reback said in an interview. He called Mr. Zuckerberg "the monopolist's C.E.O" and said the Facebook founder had engaged in "anticompetitive conduct to an extent not seen since Bill Gates," one of the founders of Microsoft.

One of Mark Zuckerberg's first steps toward building the metaverse may be physical instead of virtual. From a report: Meta, the social media company formerly known as Facebook, has discussed opening retail stores that will eventually span the world, said people with knowledge of the project and company documents viewed by The New York Times. The stores would be used to introduce people to devices made by the company's Reality Labs division, such as virtual reality headsets and, eventually, augmented reality glasses, they said.

These devices are gateways to the metaverse, a futuristic digital world where people move from virtual to augmented versions of reality almost seamlessly. Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, last week renamed his company Meta and laid out a vision for pursuing the metaverse as the next social platform. The stores would help show people that virtual reality and augmented reality can be fun and exciting, exactly the way Mr. Zuckerberg sees it. The aim of the stores is to make the world "more open and connected," according to the company documents viewed by The Times. They are also intended to spark emotions like "curiosity, closeness," as well as a sense of feeling "welcomed" while experimenting with headsets in a "judgment free journey," according to the documents.

Thelasko shares a report from Business Insider: Facebook announced last week that it's changing its name to Meta. But the transition might not be without obstacles. A company is already after the "Meta" trademark -- and was well before Facebook rolled out its new moniker. Arizona-based startup Meta PC founder Zach Shutt told Insider the company filed for the "Meta" trademark in August. The Patent and Trademark Office website confirms the filing, which states that Meta PC first began using the brand for its range of products in November 2020. [Founders Zach Shutt and Joe Darger] said they're willing to stand down if CEO Mark Zuckerberg pays them $20 million, TMZ reported. However, Shutt declined to confirm the amount, or that it made such a proposal.

Proposed European regulation that could force Apple to allow iPhone users to install software from the web would open '"Pandora's box" and could pose threats to entire networks of computers, Apple software senior vice president Craig Federighi said in a speech on Wednesday. From a report: The remarks at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal represent an escalation in Apple's rhetoric about what could go wrong if Apple is forced to change its App Store policies. [...] "European policymakers have often been ahead of the curve," Federighi said. "But requiring sideloading on iPhone would be a step backward. Instead of creating choice, it could open up a Pandora's Box of unreviewed malware and software."

The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, presented the Digital Markets Act last December. The Act is designed to stop companies like Apple, Google and Meta, the company previously known as Facebook, from abusing their power. It contains a series of rules that would require them to open up their platforms to competitors. Failure to comply could result in fines as high as 10% of the companies' worldwide annual revenue. In a report filed with the U.S. SEC last month, Apple specifically named the Digital Markets Act and said that, if enacted, it could require changes to Apple's App Store that might harm the company's financial results. On Wednesday, Federighi didn't address the potential financial impact to Apple. Instead, he argued sideloading would cause users to be tricked into downloading malware. "Even if you have no intention of sideloading, people are routinely coerced or tricked into doing it," Federighi said, citing malware on Google's Android, which allows sideloading. Google warns users against doing so in system messages and pop-ups, however. Federighi argued that although technically skilled people might be able to identify malware on the internet, their parents or children might still be fooled, making everyone's iPhone data less secure.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Facebook says it will stop using facial recognition for photo-tagging. In a Monday blog post, Meta, the social network'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, 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," 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."