Last Updated on 22/11/2021 by Sanskriti
Face recognition will be phased out of Facebook as announced on Tuesday, citing rising public and regulatory concerns. As a result of the adjustment, the social network’s parent company, Meta, has announced that it would erase more than 1 billion people’s personalized face recognition templates.
As a result of the adjustment, the social network’s parent company, Meta, has announced that it would erase more than 1 billion people’s personalized face recognition templates. According to the post, Facebook would no longer recognize people’s faces in photographs or videos. Yet, the move will have an impact on the company’s automated alt-text technology, which is used to explain photographs for those who are blind or visually impaired. Face recognition-based Facebook services will be phased down over the next few weeks.
“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,” the company said. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”
Face recognition will be phased out as part of “a company-wide move away from this form of broad identification,” according to the article. Meta, which unveiled its road map for building a large virtual world last week, said it will continue to examine face recognition technologies for situations when individuals need to authenticate their identity or avoid fraud and impersonation.
“Continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data.”
The plan to shut down the system on Facebook comes after a torrent of press headlines over the last month following the leak of a trove of internal corporate papers to news outlets, politicians, and regulators by Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower. According to the allegations, Facebook is aware of many of the problems that its applications and services generate, but either does nothing about them or struggles to remedy them.
Face.com, an Israeli start-up that specialized in face recognition for mobile apps, was purchased by Facebook in 2012 for allegedly less than $100 million. The acquisition happened only months after Facebook purchased Instagram, which was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s largest push to bring the company to mobile at the time. After being sued for collecting and keeping biometric data without first obtaining user agreement, the corporation agreed to pay a $650 million settlement in July 2020.
