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Face Recognition System on Facebook Will Be Shut Down, and 1 Billion People's Faceprint Data Will Be Deleted.

• Meta, formerly known as Facebook, announced on Tuesday that its face recognition system will be  putting an end.
• As a result of the shift, the business claims it would delete more than 1 billion people's individual facial recognition templates.
• Face recognition-based Facebook services will be removed over the next few weeks, Meta said.

Facebook stated on Tuesday that it will discontinue its facial recognition system, citing growing public and regulatory concern.

As a result of the adjustment, the social network's parent company, Meta, has announced that it will delete more than 1 billion people's personalised facial recognition templates. More than a third of Facebook's daily active users, or over 600 million accounts, have chosen to use the face recognition technology, the firm stated in a blog post.

Facebook would no longer recognise people's faces in photographs or videos, the post said.  However, the change will have an impact on the company's automatic alt text technology, which is used to describe photographs for those who are blind or visually impaired. Face recognition-based Facebook services will be phased down over the next few weeks.

“Many people are concerned about the role of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still working on establishing clear guidelines for its use,” the business added. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty,  we feel it is prudent to restrict the use of face 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 post.

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 where individuals need to verify their identity or avoid fraud and impersonation. Meta will "continue to be public about intended usage, how users can have control over these technologies and their personal data" for future uses of facial recognition technology.

The decision to shut down the system on Facebook comes after a flurry of press reports over the last month, following the leak of a trove of internal corporate documents to news outlets, MPs, and regulators by Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower.

The reports show that Facebook is aware of many of the problems that its apps and services generate, but either does nothing about them or struggles to remedy them.

Face.com, an Israeli start-up that specialised in facial recognition for mobile apps, was purchased by Facebook in 2012 for allegedly less than $100 million. The acquisition happened just months after Facebook purchased Instagram, which was CEO Mark Zuckerberg's largest push to bring the company to mobile at the time.

The corporation agreed to pay a $650 million settlement in July 2020 after being sued for collecting and storing biometric data without first obtaining user consent, as required by Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act.