Facebook announced that all face recognition features are going away from the Facebook app, and that it’ll delete all the face data.
Facebook renamed itself Meta, but that’s not enough to wipe all of its problems away. Mark Zuckerberg and his team have a long journey ahead to win back the trust of consumers. And that won’t happen without meaningful change. But Facebook seems ready to right some wrongs of the past. It all starts with removing face recognition support from the Facebook app. Facebook saw plenty of criticism in the past for the face recognition program it employed in its app. The company has used the technology for more than ten years. But in 2019, Facebook finally started asking users if they wanted to allow the app to use face recognition technology on their photos. Facebook devised the feature to allow people to tag friends more easily in photos. And users could opt out of using the feature in the past. However, Facebook’s face recognition system has seen plenty of pushback from regulators and consumers. Facebook announced in a blog post that it would retire the Face Recognition system on Facebook. If you’ve opted-in, you’ll no longer be able to tag friends in photos automatically. Facebook also said that the change would impact the Automatic Alt Text (AAT) feature that creates image descriptions for blind and visually-impaired people. AAT uses face recognition to list the names of people in a photo with face recognition enabled. Going forward, ATT will only tell users how many people are in a picture.
