Facebook's newly-rebranded parent company Meta announced on Tuesday that it plans to shut down the Face Recognition system on Facebook in the “coming weeks” as part of a wider move to limit the use of the technology across its products.
That means that users who opted in to the feature will no longer be automatically recognized in photos. Also, the company will delete over a billion facial recognition templates.
The change will also affect the Automatic Alt Text (AAT) tool, which creates image descriptions for blind and visually-impaired people. It will no longer include the names of people recognized in photos.
"This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology's history," Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta said in a blog post.
The company explained that while it still sees “facial recognition technology as a powerful tool” there are “growing concerns” about the use of this technology as a whole, including the lack of “a clear se t of rules governing its use.”
“Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate,” the company said.
“This includes services that help people gain access to a locked account, verify their identity in financial products or unlock a personal device. These are places where facial recognition is both broadly valuable to people and socially acceptable, when deployed with care. While we will continue working on use cases like these, we will ensure people have transparency and control over whether they are automatically recognized.”
“This is great news for Facebook users, and for the global movement pushing back on this technology,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation tweeted.