Facebook to end its facial recognition system
November 2, 2021
The social media giant said on Tuesday that it will shut down its facial recognition system and delete the faceprints of over 1 billion users.
The system that automatically identifies people in photos and videos for tagging has been a major concern for those worried about the abuse of technology by major companies.
"Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, Facebook's new parent company, said in a blog post.
"Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate," he added.
Facebook under fire
The decision comes as the company is reeling from a series of leaked documents revealing a company that prioritizes growth over efforts to stop the spread of falsehoods, hate and inflammatory content on its platforms.
The decision of the parent company — which owns the Facebook platform as well as other platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram — to change its name to Meta Platforms Inc has been seen as an attempt to divert attention from one of the company's worst-ever crises.
Facebook's abandoning of facial recognition software could be a signal that the company is seeking to clean up its reputation. Recognition software has been the target of criticism amid fears that it compromises privacy and can be used to target certain groups.
The social media network already stopped suggesting a user's friends for tagging in photos they upload in 2019. This followed a lawsuit in Illinois over the tag suggestion feature.
In the same year, San Francisco became the first US city to ban facial recognition software as used by police and other municipal departments.
Massive data deletion
Facebook expects to have completely removed the feature globally by December, Reuters reported.
"More than a third of Facebook's daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized," Pesenti said — that is equivalent to some 640 million people.
The shutting down of the system means "the deletion of more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates.''
The platform's automatic alt-text tool that describes photos for visually impaired people will no longer give the names of the people in the photo as it will no longer be able to identify them.
The facial recognition technology will still be used to help users recover locked accounts, the company said in the blog post.
ab/wmr (AP, AFP, Reuters)