But Facebook has recently begun scaling back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago. More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. The company is also facing perhaps its biggest public relations crisis to date after leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that it has known about the harms its products cause and often did little or nothing to mitigate them.įacebook didn’t immediately respond to questions about how people could verify that their image data was deleted, or what it would be doing with the underlying technology. The change, it said, will help it focus on building technology for what it envisions as the next iteration of the internet – the “metaverse.”

On Thursday it announced its new name Meta for Facebook the company, but not the social network. He said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology “against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.”įacebook’s about-face follows a busy few weeks. “Its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.” “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. – Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

One system care removal