Facebook will shut down its facial recognition system and delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates, citing growing concerns about the use of the technology as a whole. Privacy advocates welcomed the news.
The social networking giant formerly known as Facebook (that last week rebranded itself as “Meta”) announced that it will shut down the face recognition system on its flagship social network. This is the AI-driven system that enables automatic suggested “tagging” of people — adding names to faces based on the company’s software. Meta’s VP of AI Jerome Pesenti said in a blog post that the company will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates. “People who’ve opted in will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the change. The announcement was widely welcomed. Critics of facial recognition software have cited multiple concerns about the technology ranging from its flawed performance in recognizing people with darker skin tones due to biased training data and algorithms, to the privacy issues that surface when cameras everywhere can recognize your face. These concerns have led other tech giants including IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft refusing to sell their face recognition software to law enforcement. Caitlin Seeley George is a campaign director for Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization working on digital rights issues including facial recognition and net neutrality, among others. She was surprised by Facebook’s move to change its facial recognition policy this week.
