Social Media giant Facebook made an announcement on Tuesday that it plans to shut its face recognition system amid growing security concerns from the users as well as regulators.
“Facebook will no longer automatically recognise people’s faces in photos or videos” – read a blog post by Facebook’s parent company, Meta. It said that it will delete more than one billion people’s individual facial recognition templates as a result of this change.
All Facebook services that rely on facial recognition systems will be removed over the coming weeks.
Meta laid out its road map last week for the creation of a massive virtual world said that it will still consider facial recognition technology where people need to verify their identity or to prevent fraud and impersonation.
This move comes amid a salvo of news reports over the past month after a former employee named France Haugen turned whistleblower and released a stockpile of company documents to news outlets, lawmakers and regulators.
Reports show that Facebook is aware of may of the cons its services cause, however, it either doesn’t address them or fails to rectify them.
