Facebook announced the shutdown of its face recognition system, which automatically recognizes users in images and videos, citing rising social concerns over the use of such technology.
According to Jerome Pesenti, Facebook’s vice president of artificial intelligence, “Regulators are still in the process of establishing a clear set of regulations controlling its usage.”
“In light of this continuous uncertainty, we feel that restricting the deployment of face recognition to a limited range of use cases is justified.” The withdrawal of facial recognition by the world’s largest social media network comes as the tech sector has faced a reckoning over the ethics of employing technology in recent years. Critics argue that face recognition technology, widely used for security purposes by stores, hospitals, and other enterprises, might jeopardize privacy, target marginalized groups, and normalize intrusive monitoring. IBM has permanently discontinued sales of face recognition products, and Microsoft and Amazon.com have stopped sales to law enforcement indefinitely.
The announcement comes when Facebook is under heavy scrutiny from regulators and politicians for user safety and a wide variety of abuses on its services.
The Facebook business, which rebranded itself Meta Platforms last week, stated that more than one-third of Facebook’s daily active users had opted in to the social networking site’s face recognition feature, and the update will now destroy the “facial recognition templates” of more than 1 billion people.
According to a Facebook spokeswoman, the removal will be implemented internationally and is scheduled to be completed by December.
After eliminating facial recognition, Facebook and its automated alt-text feature, which generates picture descriptions for visually challenged individuals, will no longer include the names of persons detected in photographs but will otherwise work correctly.
Facebook has not ruled out the use of facial recognition technology in other products, calling it a “strong tool” for identity verification, for example.
The company’s facial recognition software has long been under fire. When the US Federal Trade Commission penalized Facebook $5 billion to settle privacy complaints in 2019, it cited it among the issues.
This year, a court in Illinois authorized Facebook’s US$650 million settlement of a class action alleging that it acquired and kept biometric data on users without their consent.