Facebook (Meta) is shutting down its facial recognition system

Social Media giant, Facebook, now known as Meta, announced yesterday that it was shutting down its facial recognition system. According to Jerome Pesenti, VP of Artificial Intelligence in an official statement, he said that this was being done as part of a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products.

The company said that people who already opted into the system, will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos and it will be deleting more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.

This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history. More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates. 

Facebook remarked that making this change required careful consideration, because it has seen a number of places where face recognition can be highly valued by people using platforms. It cited its automatic alt text system, which uses advanced AI to generate descriptions of images for people who are blind and visually impaired. This system uses the Face Recognition system to tell them when they or one of their friends is in an image.

Even with the merits of this technology, the company believes that this has to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. It recognised that there were still many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators were still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, they believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate. 

Pesenti ended this statement by saying, “Every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance. In the case of facial recognition, its long-term role in society needs to be debated in the open, and among those who will be most impacted by it. We will continue engaging in that conversation and working with the civil society groups and regulators who are leading this discussion.”