Over 1 billion Facebook users opted in for Facebook’s Face Recognition system, and it will soon be turned off completely.
Another possible downside to its removal is that those who opted in were automatically notified when they appear in photos or videos posted by other users on Facebook. This option could let someone know when they are being impersonated online, or when someone they do not know has posted a photo with them in it. Over 1 billion Facebook users opted in for its Face Recognition system to automatically recognize them in photos, allowing them and other users to easily tag photos on the site. Today Meta, Facebook’s new parent company, announced that it is pulling the plug on that system and erasing the faces from its servers on the Facebook site and app. In a post by Jerome Pesenti, VP of Artificial Intelligence of Meta, he revealed that Meta has made the decision to shut down the Face Recognition system on Facebook as part of the company’s move to limit the use of facial recognition on its products. He wrote, «This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history», noting that more than one third of its users had opted in for the service. Facebook has been under fire as of late due to the thousands of internal documents that were leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
