Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Facebook wants to turn real emotions into emojis by using your webcam

Hillary K. Grigonis
By

Facebook Pages
Marcel De Grijs / 123RF
Update: We’ve added an official statement from Facebook regarding the patents.

Sure, Facebook allows users to attach a feeling to any status but a recently approved patent suggests emotions could become an even bigger player through facial-recognition technology. Future versions of the platform could use cameras, keyboard movement, and touchpad gestures to track emotions, automatically inserting emojis and adjusting the font or even using emotions to analyze reactions, the patent suggests.

Recommended Videos

The set of three patents, recently uncovered by CB Insights, were submitted back in 2014 and 2015 but were only recently published publicly. All three patents detail technology designed to track the user’s emotions, but each one uses that tracking in different ways.

Related

The first patent is designed for Facebook Messages. The idea is to aid text-only messages, which can sometimes be misconstrued without any hints of emotion or context. The technology works based on the way the user interacts with the keyboard, touchscreen or “other input devices.” Factors like how quickly the keys are pressed, how hard they are pressed and whether or not the smartphone is moving around or staying in place can offer clues as to the user’s emotions. The messaging platform then could take that data and adjust the font, the font size and other visual tools to help convey more meaning in the message.

The second patent detects emotion not from keyboard strokes, but from a smartphone’s front-facing camera or a webcam. Cameras and facial-recognition technology are able to trigger a photo with a smile — Facebook’s patent instead looks for visual emotional cues and stores that data to create a more customized newsfeed. According to the patent, the emotion data would be used to help deliver more content that users respond to as well as adding additional analytical data for publishers on what type of response their content received.

What could scare some users is that the camera doesn’t have to be “on” for the tech to work. The patent details using “passive imaging data” or information captured automatically without the user actually turning the camera on.

The third patent would use similar facial recognition technology, only instead of using the data to track your responses, this feature would find the most appropriate emoji automatically, matching your facial features to an emoji. Along with recognizing smiles, the patent suggests the technology could also recognize gestures, like a thumbs up, and translate those into emojis as well.

Patents may offer insight into what a company is researching, but they do not always become actual products. “We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans,” a Facebook spokesperson told Digital Trends.

The idea of using emotion recognition technology to track responses is not a completely new idea — consider this billboard that determined each viewer’s response to the message. While most might be able to get onboard with not digging through the emoji list to find the right one, the idea of being watched while scrolling through Facebook might prompt more than a few to follow CEO Mark Zuckerberg in covering the camera with duct tape if the patent ever becomes reality.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary K. Grigonis
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
If Facebook wants to stick around, it needs to disappear for a bit
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg | The future is private

Aside from making billions of dollars, Facebook has had a nightmarish past few years. Since the Cambridge Analytica debacle that came to light in 2018, the company has made headlines for all the wrong reasons seemingly every week.

From data breaches to antitrust charges, Facebook has been mired in a deep malaise of privacy missteps and a string of controversies. Its public reputation has taken a dramatic beating and is at an all-time low. In the last two years, the social network has lost 15 million users in the United States. The company even paid a $5 billion settlement to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over "privacy missteps."

Read more
Facebook has suspended ‘tens of thousands’ of apps over private data use
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Washington, D.C.

Facebook says it has suspended “tens of thousands” of apps suspected of misusing private user data amid an investigation that it began last year following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The social media giant promised in March 2018 to take a look at all of the apps on Facebook that had access to large amounts of user information prior to when it changed its policy in 2014. The resulting suspensions were announced in a blog post on Friday. The investigation began after right-wing political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica improperly mined data from 87 million Facebook users. 
"Our App Developer Investigation is by no means finished. But there is meaningful progress to report so far," Ime Archibong, Facebook's vice president of product partnerships, wrote in the blog post. "To date, this investigation has addressed millions of apps. Of those, tens of thousands have been suspended for a variety of reasons while we continue to investigate."
Facebook said that it initially selected apps for investigation based on their user numbers, as well as how much data they could access from user accounts. It has since broadened that investigation to include apps that it thinks have the potential to abuse its policies, a process that involves both a background investigation of the developer, as well as an analysis of the app’s activity on the platform.
The investigation, Archibong wrote, involved “hundreds of people: Attorneys, external investigators, data scientists, engineers, policy specialists, platform partners, and other teams across the company.” 
While Facebook says that it removed tens of thousands of apps, it notes that the suspended apps, while plentiful, were only created by roughly 400 developers. An app being suspended doesn’t mean that it was necessarily posing a threat to people, and many were still in their testing phase when they were suspended, so they were never readily available to Facebook’s wider user base.
Facebook says it is not unusual for developers to have multiple test apps that never get rolled out. In some cases, apps were suspended because the developer did not respond to a request for information from Facebook, not due to any actual policy violations. One app, myPersonality, apparently shared information with researchers and companies but refused to take part in Facebook's audit -- so it was banned
The post goes on to says that Facebook hasn’t confirmed any other instances of misuse to date other than those it has already revealed to the public and that it has taken legal action against a handful of apps for a number of different reasons.
Beyond the investigation, Facebook says it has “made widespread improvements to how we evaluate and set policies for all developers that build on our platforms.” It also removed a number of APIs and has increased the number of people that work on its investigations team in order to better handle them in the future.

Read more
Facebook will stop using facial recognition by default on your photos
Mark Zuckerberg Tagged

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it will stop using facial recognition by default on your photos and tagging suggestions.

In a blog post published Tuesday, Facebook said that new users who sign up and those users who had the tag suggestion setting turned on will get a notice about face recognition with transparency on how the platform uses the technology. Users will be able to easily opt-in or opt-out of these settings starting Tuesday.

Read more