Facebook Shutting Down Controversial Facial Recognition System… – Variety

Facebook announced that it will shut down the social service’s facial-recognition system, and as part of that will delete more than 1 billion people’s individual facial-recognition templates. For more than a decade, Facebook has used the opt-in system to automatically recognize people in photos and videos shared on the service. But the technology has drawn fire from privacy advocates and regulators for years. Last year Facebook agreed to pay $650 million to settle class-action litigation alleging the tech giant violated users’ privacy via its photo-tagging feature that uses the face-recognition system — one of the biggest ever amounts in a privacy lawsuit. “We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules,” Jerome Pesenti, VP of artificial intelligence at Meta (the new corporate name of Facebook), wrote in a blog post Tuesday. In the next few weeks, Facebook’s Face Recognition system will be shuttered as part of “a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products,” Pesenti added. The move comes less than a week after the company renamed itself Meta, reflecting Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to reposition the company as focused on…
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