Facebook Kills Facial Recognition Tagging Tech, Deleting A Billion ‘Faceprints’
Image via Meta
Facebook’s parent company Meta has just announced it will be shutting down its facial recognition system, including the deletion of over a billion user “faceprints,” as lawmakers and advocates sound the alarm against the technology.
Recently, Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg have come under fire for a multitude of issues, ranging from its platforms’ toxic imprint on teens, to a whistleblower alleging the company prioritized profits over users’ safety. This radical step could be part of its efforts to quell its critics and prove that it is willing to make the necessary changes to its social media sites.
According to The Guardian, the facial recognition software was mostly used to automatically identify users in pictures and videos uploaded onto Facebook. The company said this was “one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage” in history, as over a third of the platform’s daily active users have opted into the setting.
The technology, while controversial, has proven to be incredibly useful for the visually impaired, making use of artificial intelligence to generate live descriptions of images, including identifying the people featured in a picture. However, due to “complex social issues” such as privacy concerns, Meta has decided to limit its use for the time being.
“There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” explained Meta’s Vice-President of Artificial Intelligence, Jerome Pesenti.
“Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”
Going forward, users will no longer be able to enable facial recognition for suggested tagging or see a suggested tag should they appear in an image or video.
Facebook will still encourage manual tagging so that friends and acquaintances can identify one another more easily in posts.
[via The Guardian and Meta, cover image Meta]
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