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- Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition system amid ongoing privacy and security concerns from regulators and users of the social media platform
- The company says while there are many positive uses for this kind of tech, it needs to weigh these against growing societal concerns around data and privacy
- By shutting down its facial recognition system, Facebook says it will delete the facial recognition template of over one billion people
- This means Facebook will no longer be able to automatically recognise people in pictures and videos posted to the platform
- Vice-president of AI Jerome Pesentisays alongside societal concerns, regulators are still in the process of providing clear guidelines and rules of facial recognition tech
Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition system amid ongoing privacy and security concerns from regulators and users of the social media platform.
The tech giant, which last week changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc, announced the move in a blog post on Tuesday, saying while there were many positive uses of its facial recognition tech, it needed to weigh these against growing societal concerns.
This means Facebook will no longer be able to automatically recognise people in pictures and videos posted to the platform — a feature currently available to users who opt-in.
The feature has several uses, including notifying someone if a picture of them has been posted to Facebook from someone else’s account.
Further, the facial recognition tech uses artificial intelligence (AI) to general descriptions of images for blind or visually impaired people so they know if they or one of their friends is in an image.
According to Facebook, over a third of its daily active users have opted in to the facial recognition feature.
By shutting down the system, Facebook will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.
Facebook vice-president of AI Jerome Pesenti said the company still believed facial recognition could be a powerful tool for uses such as people needing to verify their identity or to prevent fraught and impersonation.
“We believe facial recognition can help for products like these with privacy, transparency and control in place, so you decide if and how your face is used,” Mr Pesenti said.
“But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole.”
He added that alongside societal concerns, regulators were still in the process of providing clear guidelines and rules of facial recognition tech.
“Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate,” Mr Pesenti said.
Facebook’s use of facial recognition has been under scrutiny for quite some time, with the software included among US Federal Trade Commission concerns back in 2019 when Facebook was fined US$5 billion (A$6.73 billion) to settle privacy complaints.
