Meta will introduce a service based on facial recognition technology in South Korea to block advertisements and accounts that impersonate celebrities on the Facebook platform. In this process, to alleviate concerns about privacy violations, the Personal Information Protection Commission applied a 'preliminary appropriateness review system' to assess the legal and institutional validity of the new technology in advance.
On the 29th, the Personal Information Protection Commission noted that it discussed and passed the preliminary appropriateness review results of the 'advertisement and account blocking service for impersonating celebrities' submitted by Meta during a plenary meeting the previous day. This follows Meta's formal request for review by the commission prior to the domestic launch of the service.
The service allows celebrities to voluntarily agree to the use of facial recognition technology, after which Meta will register them as protected individuals and extract and store facial feature points to detect impersonation content. If the individual later withdraws consent, the facial information will be deleted immediately.
When an advertisement or account suspected of impersonation is detected, the service extracts facial feature points from the image and compares them to the facial information of the protected celebrity. If there is a match, automatic blocking measures are taken, and if necessary, human intervention or an objection process is also followed.
The Personal Information Protection Commission clarified that the principle of 'immediate deletion after one-time processing' of facial information should be upheld and required Meta to submit supporting documents such as server logs that can be validated afterward. Additionally, the commission mandated that the privacy policy must clearly state that images or public profile photos may be temporarily processed for detection purposes, to ensure users are aware of this.
The Personal Information Protection Commission plans to request documentation to ensure that Meta faithfully implements the resolutions of this decision in the operation of the service in the future.
A representative from the Personal Information Protection Commission said, 'The preliminary appropriateness review system aims to reduce uncertainties in the application of laws due to technological advancements and to proactively prevent potential privacy violations.' They added, 'We will continue to actively operate to ensure that new technology-based services do not conflict with laws and regulations.'