Facebook announced it will be shuttering its facial recognition system over the coming weeks, deleting more than a billion people’s individual facial template. People who have opted in to the Face Recognition setting, estimated at over a third of Facebook daily users, will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos. The company turned face recognition off by default in September 2019, after receiving a fine from the US Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations.
Facebook said the shutdown was part of a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in its products amid growing concerns about the technology as a whole, and with regulators still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use.
The company still sees facial recognition as a powerful tool, for verifying identity or preventing fraud and impersonation, and will continue to work on the systems and with outside experts. Facebook believes the technology is appropriate for a narrow set of use cases, including helping people gain access to a locked account, verifying their identity for financial products or to unlock a personal device. The company believes facial recognition can be particularly valuable when it operates privately, on a person’s own device. This requires no communication of face data with an external server, and is most commonly deployed in systems used to unlock smartphones. In these cases, facial recognition can help with privacy, transparency and control in place, with people deciding if and how their face is used.
With the elimination of the system, Facebook will no longer automatically recognise if people’s faces appear in Memories, photos or videos. Users will no longer be able to turn on face recognition for suggested tagging or see a suggested tag with their name in photos and videos they may appear in. They will still be able to tag manually. In addition, the alt text system, which used AI to generate descriptions of images for people who are blind and visually impaired, will no longer be able to identify people in a photo. Facebook said it will work with the blind and visually impaired community on technologies to improve the service.
