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.<\/b>
\nThe social networking giant formerly known as Facebook (that last week rebranded itself as \u201cMeta\u201d) 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 \u201ctagging\u201d of people — adding names to faces based on the company\u2019s software. Meta\u2019s VP of AI Jerome Pesenti said in a blog post that the company will delete more than a billion people\u2019s individual facial recognition templates. \u201cPeople who\u2019ve opted in will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos,\u201d 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\u2019s move to change its facial recognition policy this week. \u201cI was surprised because Facebook has demonstrated that it\u2019s not concerned about harming users as long as the company can profit,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I think this signifies just how toxic facial recognition technology has become. If even Facebook is willing to walk away from it, then it\u2019s clear our work to show the grassroots opposition to facial recognition is working.\u201d George is calling on other companies and lawmakers to reject the technology, too. On a network with the word \u201cface\u201d in its name, the change for Facebook is monumental. \u201cThe change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology\u2019s history,\u201d Pesenti wrote in his blog post. \u201cMore than a third of Facebook\u2019s daily active users have opted-in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized.\u201d While he acknowledged \u201cgrowing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,\u201d Pesenti also used his blog to list the technology\u2019s benefits. For instance, Pesenti noted that the change will impact the company\u2019s \u201caward-winning automatic alt text system that uses advanced AI to generate descriptions of images for people who are blind and visually impaired\u2026 to tell them when they or one of their friends is in an image.\u201d Pesenti noted that Facebook also lets people be automatically notified when they appear in photos or videos posted by others, and that feature won\u2019t work anymore. \u201cLooking ahead, we still see facial recognition as a powerful tool, for example, for people needing to verify their identity, or to prevent fraud and impersonation,\u201d Pesenti wrote. \u201cWe believe facial recognition can help for products like these with privacy, transparency, and control in place, so you can decide if and how your face is used. We will continue working on these technologies and engaging outside experts.\u201d Pesenti said that Facebook believes that \u201climiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.\u201d For instance, facial recognition technology is used as an identity authentication system to perform tasks such as unlocking your phone, so you don\u2019t have to type in a password every time. This use case doesn\u2019t require face data to be communicated with an external server, Pesenti noted. \u201cThe changes we\u2019re announcing today involve a company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification and toward narrower forms of personal identification,\u201d he wrote. Facebook\u2019s announcement today follows a difficult month for the company after a former insider turned whistleblower detailed how the company\u2019s own research found that the network\u2019s algorithms amplified hate and political unrest, going public with the allegations in a 60 Minutes interview. Less than 24 hours later, the company experienced a six-hour outage that it attributed to a misconfiguration that cascaded across the network. Just last week, the company\u2019s rebrand as Meta was received with caution and skepticism. What to Read Next: 5 Lessons from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Outage Gartner: Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2022 and Beyond How to Build a Strong and Effective Data Retention Policy Tech Giants Back Off Selling Facial Recognition AI to Police<\/p>\n