Facebook has said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people.
“This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history,” said a blog post-Tuesday from Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook’s new parent company, Meta.
“More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted into our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.”
Facebook’s about-face follows its Thursday announcement that it was renaming itself, Meta, in order to focus on building technology for what it envisions as the next iteration of the internet — the “metaverse.”
The company is also facing perhaps its biggest public relations crisis to date after leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that it has known about the harms its products cause and often did little or nothing to mitigate them.
More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users (640 million people) have opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system.
The company in 2019 ended its practice of using face recognition software to identify users’ friends in uploaded photos and automatically suggesting they “tag” them. Facebook was sued in Illinois over the tag suggestion feature.
