Meta, facebook’s newly rebranded parent company on Tuesday announced plans to stop its decade-old “Face Recognition” system and would also delete more than a billion users’ facial recognition templates as part of a wider initiative to limit the use of the technology across its products.
This shutdown would take effect over the coming weeks and would also imply that users who have previously opted into the setting will no longer be automatically recognized in Memories, photos and videos. The company’s Automatic Alt Text (AAT) tool which creates image which creates image descriptions for visually impaired people, will no longer include the names of people identified in photos.
This discontinuation is coming in the wake of privacy and ethical concerns raised by the use of facial recognition that it could be used to target marginalized communities and normalize intrusive surveillance leading to government bans across a number of cities in the U.S. such as New Orleans, San Francisco and Minneapolis.
Facebook has stated that these changes is coming amid the need to “weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.” However the use of face recognition for the purpose of helping people gain access to locked account as well as verifying their identity in financial products or unlocking of a personal device will go on.
This development also arrives as Facebook attempts to rebrand and distance itself from a wide range of controversies which has plagued its products in recent years.
Facial recognition was introduced by facebook in 2010 as a means to automatically tag photos and videos with names based on a “face recognition template” it generates from users’ profile pictures as well as photos and videos that they have already been tagged in.
The feature was enabled by default at launch but was scaled back and made an explicit opt-in in September 2019, following which more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users — about 640 million people — are said to have opted to turn on the setting.
“This is great news for Facebook users, and for the global movement pushing back on this technology,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a tweet.