Meta Gets Rid Of Facebook’s Face Recognition System

Facebook will be shutting down its Face Recognition system, according to parent company Meta. While you can still manually tag people in photos, Facebook won’t recommend individuals to tag anymore.

The social media platform has long used facial recognition to automatically detect who is in a picture and will notify you if it finds your face in images uploaded by others. Meta claims that over a third of Facebook’s users have opted into their Face Recognition technology, leading to more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.

Face Recognition is also used on Facebook’s Automatic Alt Text (ATT) system, which reads aloud the names of the people it detects in an image, making it highly useful for those who are blind or with vision impairment. Of course, with the deletion of the facial database, this feature will be limited to only recognising how many individuals are in a photo, without being able to identify each person.

Meta said that it believes that facial recognition is still useful for identity verification or fraud prevention, but requires privacy and transparency control. It claims that the move intends to limit the overall use of facial recognition technology in the company’s products.

(Source: Meta.)