Computer Vision News Computer Vision News 16 Public Identity Management Tal spent much of his tech career working on face recognition products at AWS and Facebook, particularly face recognition in the wild. Around 2020 there started to be a worldwide increase in enforcement of privacy regulations, which is a good thing per se, but it led to the eventual shutdown and stepping away from face recognition products. It became touchy and very expensive. At some point Big Tech decided, and we can understand why, to take a step back. That left a gap, because there are very important and sensitive use cases, that would be very difficult to solve without having a way to recognize people. Tal tells us of real-life examples, like when where your name, your image or your likeness is being misused. Someone's taking your face and doing something with it that is harmful to you, including spreading misinformation, harassment and ransoming you. According to a paper that was released with a Google co-author from 2024, across 10 countries that they surveyed, 2.2% of surveyed people said they fell victim to harassment using non-consensual, synthetic, intimate imagery. If you think 2.2% of the American population, it's millions! “Now why does that happen?,” Tal asks. “There's laws against that, that's a crime. But you cannot enforce it without knowing, without scanning the image and looking for people who are not supposed to be there!” Tal Hassner (left) is a co-founder and CTO of a young startup company called WEIR AI. Tal with co-founder and CEO Gary McCoy (right) hope to have their product out very soon. Tal was formerly an associate professor back in Israel and visiting research associate professor at USC. We asked him to tell us: Who owns your face?
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