Meta announced this Tuesday that it will close the facial recognition system of Facebook (social network) that has been used for more than a decade to automatically identify users in photos and videos. The company's decision comes amid growing privacy concerns related to the use of this type of technology.
The company run by Mark Zuckerberg says that people who chose to use facial recognition on Facebook will lose the feature “in the next few weeks.” As a result of this change, Meta has also announced the elimination of more than one billion individual facial recognition templates .
The firm ensures that more than a third of active Facebook users used facial recognition. Features included automatically notifying them when they appeared in photos or videos and providing tagging recommendations. It also fed the automatic alt text system.
But growing concerns regarding the use of these systems have weighed to put an end to it. “Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing their use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe it is appropriate to limit the use of facial recognition,” notes Facebook's parent company.
The signature indicates that the facial recognition system is a powerful tool for the future . “We believe that facial recognition can help for products like these with privacy, transparency and control, so that you decide if your face is used and how. We will continue to work on these technologies and involve external experts.” indicates.
Facebook, facial recognition and data collection
Credit: Facebook The truth is that the social network Facebook was a benchmark in facial recognition systems. It began to use it in 2010 , when it was still a technology not used by many companies and, as the firm itself recognizes, over the years it managed to create more than one billion individual templates powered by the users' own images.
This database and the underlying technology are a controversial treasure trove of biometric recognition for much of the world's population that, in the wrong hands, could be used for questionable purposes. Meta itself had to pay a $ 650 million fine for identifying Illinois Facebook users without their consent.
It should also be noted that Meta, although it does not admit it publicly, is in a process of cleaning its image. This gesture of ending a controversial technology, in addition to its name change, may be an attempt to try to regain some of the lost trust in users.
