Facebook announced it is shutting down its Face Recognition system on its platform and will delete over 1 billion people’s facial recognition profiles.
- Facebook declared on Tuesday that it would stop its facial recognition system.
- Facebook uses the face recognition system to automatically analyse photos taken of tagged users and associated users' profile photos to recognise them in photos and videos.
- This change will also impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), which builds image descriptions for blind and visually-impaired people.
Facebook announced it is shutting down its Face Recognition system on its platform and will delete over 1 billion people’s facial recognition profiles.
“In the coming weeks, we will shut down the Face Recognition system on Facebook as part of a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products. As part of this change, people who have opted in to our Face Recognition setting will no longer be automatically recognised in photos and videos, and we will delete the facial recognition template used to identify them,” reads a blog post published by Facebook.
More than a third of Facebook's active users have opted for a Face Recognition setting, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s facial recognition templates.
The company said that it believes face recognition is a powerful technology that could be used to protect the privacy of the users and ensure transparency and control in place; for this reason, it will continue to work on these technologies
The decision to stop using the technology is related to many concerns about the abuse of facial recognition technology in our society.
Stopping using this technology will impact multiple features such as the automatic recognition of users in video and photos and the Automatic Alt Text (AAT) technology used to create image descriptions for blind or visually impaired people.
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