Facebook To Shutter Facial Recognition Photo Feature

The New York Times reports:

Facebook plans to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of more than one billion users and effectively eliminating a feature that has fueled privacy concerns, government investigations, a class-action lawsuit and regulatory woes.

Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, Facebook’s newly named parent company, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the social network was making the change because of “many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society.”

The decision shutters a feature that was introduced in December 2010 so that Facebook users could save time. The facial-recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users’ digital photo albums and suggested users “tag” them all with a click, linking their accounts to the images.

Read the full article.

Breaking News: Facebook plans to delete face scan data from over 1 billion users, shutting down a facial recognition system that became a privacy headache. https://t.co/AHong4rDc1

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 2, 2021