Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is putting an end to its facial recognition system amid growing concern from regulators.
The social network, whose parent company has been renamed “Meta,” said it will delete more than one billion people’s individual facial recognition templates as a result of the change. The company said that more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users, or over 600 million accounts, had opted into the use of the face recognition technology.
Facebook will also no longer automatically recognize people’s faces in photos or videos, the company said. The change, however, will also impact the automatic alt text technology that the company uses to describe images for people who are blind or visually impaired.
Facebook, which laid out its road map last week for the creation of a massive virtual world, said it will still consider facial recognition technology for instances where people need to verify their identity or to prevent fraud and impersonation.
The decision to shut down the system comes amid a barrage of news reports over the past month after Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower, released a trove of internal company documents to news outlets, lawmakers and regulators.
The reports show that Facebook is aware of many of the harms its apps and services cause but either doesn’t rectify the issues or struggles to address them.
In 2012, Facebook acquired Israeli start-up Face.com for $100 million, snapping up a team of developers who focused on facial recognition for mobile apps. The deal came just months after Facebook acquired Instagram, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest effort at the time to move the business to mobile.
In July 2020, the company agreed to pay a $650 million settlement after it was sued for collecting and storing biometric data without first getting user consent, which is prohibited by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.