Meta, Facebook’s new parent company, announced that it would remove this facial recognition technology from Facebook.
This technology is used for the auto-tagging feature of photos and videos on Facebook. In addition to stopping facial recognition engines, Facebook will also remove more than 1 billion Facebook user facial recognition data templates from the system.
“In the coming weeks, we will be shutting down the facial recognition system on Facebook as part of the company’s move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products,” said Facebook VP of Artificial Intelligence, Jerome Pesenti on the official Meta page.
Pesenti also explained, the termination of Facebook’s facial recognition engine will also have an impact on Facebook users who activate this feature.
The following is the impact of discontinuing Facebook’s facial recognition technology for users:
1. Facebook will no longer automatically recognize users if they appear in photos, videos or memories.
2. Users can no longer activate face recognition for the purpose of automatically tagging friends in photos or videos on Facebook.
3. Users who activate facial recognition technology on Facebook will also no longer get notifications when their friends upload photos of themselves.
4. The automatic alt text (AAT) feature will no longer identify anyone in the photo. AAT is a technology that Facebook uses to create photo descriptions for visually impaired people.
“AAT currently identifies people in about 4 percent of photos. After the change, AAT can still recognize the ‘number’ of people in the photo, but will no longer attempt to identify ‘who’ the person is,” Pesenti said.
Fifth, if the user activates facial recognition technology, Facebook will delete the template used to identify the user.
Pros and cons
Facebook’s facial recognition technology has indeed reaped the pros and cons since it was introduced in 2010. Although Facebook claims to only use facial recognition on its own website, and does not sell the technology to third parties, facial recognition on Facebook still brings a lot of complaints.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook a record $5 billion fine for resolving privacy complaints directed against the company in 2019. One of the complaints was about the facial recognition technology. Last year, Facebook also agreed to pay a $650 million fine to settle a lawsuit in the US state of Illinois. The lawsuit alleges Facebook violated a state law requiring residents’ consent to use their biometric information, including their “face geometry.”
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