Facebook to shut down its facial recognition system, over 1bn users to be affected

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition system, its parent company said Tuesday, a change that will impact over a billion users and which comes after serious concerns over privacy.
"More than a third of Facebook's daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates," parent company Meta said in a statement.
In a blog post, Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Meta, said: “More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.”
He said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology “against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.”
Facebook’s about-face follows its Thursday announcement that it was renaming itself Meta in order to focus on building technology for what it envisions as the next iteration of the internet - the “metaverse”. The company is also facing perhaps its biggest public relation crisis to date after leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that it has known about the harms its products cause and often did little or nothing to mitigate them.