Facebook flat close your face recognition system this month, which is a decade old, erasing facial scan data from more than a billion users.
With this change, Facebook will remove a feature that raised privacy issues, government investigations, class action and regulatory issues.
Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, the newly appointed controller of Facebook, explains in a blog that the change is due to “A lot of concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society.”
He added that the company continued to view the software as a powerful tool, but “Each new technology brings with it a potential for benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance.”
The decision ends a feature introduced in December 2010 to automatically identify people who appear in photo albums users and offered them to “tag” them with one click, linking their accounts to the images.
Facial recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy in recent years, has been the subject of debate because of the misuse that governments, law enforcement agencies and corporations can make of it.
Facebook only used its facial recognition features on its own website and did not sell its software to third parties. Still, privacy advocates repeatedly raised questions about how much facial data Facebook had accumulated and what the company could do with that information.
When the Federal Trade Commission imposed a record $5 billion fine on Facebook for resolving privacy complaints in 2019, facial recognition software was among the concerns.
Last year, the company also agreed to pay $650 million to settle a class action in Illinois that accused Facebook of violating a state law that requires residents’ consent to use their biometric information, including their “facial geometry.”
The change affects more than a third of daily Facebook users who had facial recognition enabled on their accounts, according to the company. This means they receive alerts when new photos or videos of them have been uploaded to the social network.
The feature was also used to flag accounts that might be impersonating someone else and was incorporated into software that describes the photos to blind users.