Facebook has decided to shut down Face Recognition program. The company will delete face data of its billions of users from the system by December 2021.<\/b>
\nFacebook, the company which recently changed its name to \u2018Meta,\u2019 has announced that it\u2019s shutting down its Facebook\u2019s face recognition program \u2014 the technology that automatically recognizes users in photos and videos. The move comes after Facebook\u2019s long legal battle, and now the company has decided to shut down the program. Facebook AI\u2019s vice president, Jerome Pesenti, on the shut of face recognition system said that the \u201cregulators 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.\u201d Facebook allowed users to auto-tag people in a photo when they uploaded the picture to the social media platform. Facebook would recognize the faces of people in the photo, but following a $650 million settlement in February this year, the company made it an opt-in feature. Though Pesenti still says that Facebook still \u201csees\u201d facial recognition technology as a powerful tool. The company says that nearly one-third of the billions of people using the social media platform had opted-in. However, as a part of the change, Facebook will delete face recognition profiles of billions of users. In addition, Facebook\u2019s automated alt-text technology \u2013 the system which automatically summarized the scene for blind users in a single sentence \u2013 will no longer \u201cname people\u201d when generating a summary. Facebook says that the long-term role [of technologies like face recognition] in society needs to be debated in the open, \u201camong those who will be most impacted by it.\u201d The company says that it will \u201ccontinue engaging in that conversation and working with the civil society groups and regulators who are leading this discussion.\u201d In a statement to Reuters, a Facebook spokesperson said that the current face recognition data of users will be deleted from its system by December 2021. Source: Facebook Blog Via: The Verge, Reuters<\/p>\n