Social network Facebook to shut down face recognition system

When people opted in to allowing the use of facial recognition, Facebook scanned a “faceprint” of that user and used it to find photos and videos of them on the platform

Facebook has announced it is deleting nearly 1 billion “faceprints” it used as part of a facial recognition system for photo tagging, citing concerns with the technology.

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 for Facebook’s new parent company, Meta, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. Its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.

When people opted in to allowing the use of facial recognition, Facebook scanned a “faceprint” of that user and used it to find photos and videos of them on the platform, and suggested tagging them.

It was also used to identify if someone else was impersonating that user on Facebook, and helped with accessibility for people with visual impairments by telling them who was in a photo.

Pesenti said while facial recognition technology is a powerful tool to verify identity; it needs strong privacy and transparency controls to let people limit how their faces are used. He noted there were many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, with regulators still playing catch up.

Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate, he said.

Pesenti said facial recognition was most valuable when operating on a person’s device only – such as for unlocking iPhones – rather than communicating with an external server, as Facebook’s technology had operated.

The decision is a good example of trying to make product decisions that are good for the user and the company, said Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. She added that the move also demonstrates the power of public and regulatory pressure, since the face recognition system has been the subject of harsh criticism for over a decade.

It comes at a time when the social network has faced widespread criticism over its attitude towards user privacy and safety, after the release of tens of thousands of internal documents from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.