Facebook ends facial recognition system
Facebook social media platform is shutting down its facial recognition system and deleting scanned data on a billion people, in a response to privacy concerns.
The announcement comes as the tech giant battles one of its worst crises ever, with reams of internal documents leaked to reporters, lawmakers and US regulators fuelling fresh calls for government regulation.
This policy change shuts down a feature that automatically identified people who appeared in Facebook users’ digital photos, and was key to the company building a global library of faces that became a magnet for controversy.
“This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history,” wrote Jerome Pesenti, the vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook’s parent company Meta.
“There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” he added.
Facial identification, launched in 2010, went through changes to tighten privacy, but still was central to a significant lawsuit and regulatory scrutiny.
In the United States, faced with pressure from watchdogs, tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google have stopped, at least temporarily, selling facial recognition software to police forces.
“Facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that,” said Caitlin Seeley George, campaign director at digital advocacy group Fight for the Future.
As the company battles its whistleblower revelations, it has changed its parent company name to Meta in an effort to move past being a scandal-plagued social network to its virtual reality vision for the future.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp which are used by billions around the world will keep their names under the rebranding that critics have called an effort to distract from the platform’s dysfunction.
The Guardian/ Stephanie Ingbian
