Meta, now known as Meta, has announced that it will turn off the facial recognition system that has been around on Facebook for a decade and delete all stored data to limit the use of company-wide facial recognition.
In 2010, Facebook introduced a facial recognition system that automatically identifies people who appear in photos shared by its users. With this feature, when it uploaded new photos and videos, it offered a recommendation to identify and tag people in the media. The system was the source of software that both identified accounts that mimicked someone else and explained the photos to visually impaired users.
However, this facial recognition system raised many privacy concerns, government investigations, and many other problems. Meta officially announced that it will shut down the facial recognition system that has been around for a decade this month and delete all facial scan data.
Although facial recognition technology is sometimes useful to users in terms of security, there were also many instances of abuse. Facebook said that while it still sees the feature as a powerful tool, they decided to remove it because they were considering the concerns it had raised in the community.
Facebook will remove its facial recognition system this month and delete individual facial recognition templates from more than a billion people who have been registered so far, meta’s official website announced. This change will also affect the Auto Alternate Text (ATT), which creates an image description for visually impaired people. Alternative texts will no longer provide information about the identities of the people in the photos but will continue to work as they are.
