Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to discuss Facebook, which we know recently changed its name to Meta and announced that it would be focusing its energies on developing its virtual reality, the metaverse. Mr. Mark Zuckerberg outlined how the metaverse technology will involve inhabiting virtual spaces, using wearable sensors to track one's body and wearable headsets and other sensors, which can map one's home and the space around it.

Around the same time, Facebook also announced it was shutting down its facial recognition system and deleting its huge trove of face data that it had collected, which includes the faceprints of around 1 billion people. On the surface, this was welcomed. It seemed like a positive move. A couple of years previously, Mr. Zuckerberg made a statement promising that the future is private, and it might have seemed that he was fulfilling that promise. In reality, the only reason Facebook is deleting its face data is because regulators, policy-makers and citizens were slowly catching up with it.

In Illinois in 2020, Facebook was sued for its use of people's faceprints to suggest tags and had to pay €650 million to settle that class action. Seven states and over 20 cities in the US have limited government use of facial recognition tech amid fears over civil rights violations, racial bias and invasion of privacy. It took a long time for regulators to catch up with facial recognition technology. Bureaucracy and politics move slowly, and Facebook knows this. In short, facial recognition has finally become a regulatory headache for Facebook, attracting huge amounts of scrutiny.

Last week it was reported in the Financial Timesthat Facebook has been applying for patents for new technology, which will be used in the metaverse. These new technologies will track one's eye movements and facial expressions. Effectively, what we have here is the removal of facial recognition, but a new way to get around policy through loopholes and introduce something similar, but done through sensory features. There is no reason why this technology cannot store new types of prints, perhaps generated from a person's movements or other physical features. Perhaps they will not be called faceprints, but they will be called something else.

There are many other sinister purposes that the metaverse sensors will be put to. For example, some of these sensors are designed to scan the inside of one's home. These sensors might detect where objects are inside one's home and therefore what it can sell to people.

Facebook's strategy to be able to keep collecting and exploiting our data is to pretend it is no longer collecting the data and then simply collecting it and exploiting it in a completely different way. It is deleting its face data while working on new ways to extract biometric data from us. The problem here is that tech evolves faster than we can regulate it. On this basis, it is crucial that, as policy-makers, we are proactive about this. I would like to call for a debate in this Chamber on artificial intelligence, the metaverse, facial recognition and its new technology in terms of sensory printing.