Meta to delete Facebook's Face Recognition system

In a statement, Meta today announced that the company is shutting down the Face Recognition system on Facebook. It will also delete more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates.

Bye Face Recognition?

The end of Facebook Face Recognition System?

According to the company, this is a part of its company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in its products. Facebook also notes that they need to "weigh" the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.

To recap, the social media giant has been under political, legal, and regulatory pressure over its use of the software, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos.

The company said that they will be implementing the change in the coming weeks. Basically, people who opted in using Facebook's Face Recognition system setting will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos.

The change will be one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in tech history. This will affect more than a third of the daily Facebook users that use face recognition.

This change will also impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), which creates image descriptions for blind and visually-impaired people. AAT descriptions will no longer include the names of people recognized in photos but will function normally otherwise, Facebook said.

Facebook will no longer automatically recognize if people's faces appear in Memories, photos, or videos as well.

Every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance. In the case of facial recognition, its long-term role in society needs to be debated in the open, and among those who will be most impacted by it. We will continue engaging in that conversation and working with the civil society groups and regulators who are leading this discussion.

To read Facebook's full statement, check the source below.

Source: Facebook, Via: The Guardian