Meta has decided to shut down the Face Recognition system on Facebook.
It announced on its blog that those who had opted in “will no longer be automatically recognized in photos & videos”. What’s more, the company decided to delete over a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.
This change will also impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), which creates image descriptions for blind & visually-impaired people. After this change, AAT descriptions will no longer include the names of people recognized in photos but will function normally otherwise.
This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history, claimed Meta. More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to for the Face Recognition setting & are able to be recognized.
Looking ahead, said Meta, it still saw facial recognition technology “as a powerful tool”, for example, for people needing to verify their identity, or to prevent fraud & 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. We will continue working on these technologies and engaging outside experts.
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. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, & regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.
Meta
