Facebook to scrap facial recognition

The social media platform—under its newly renamed parent company Meta—will begin removing its Face Recognition setting amid safety concerns from users and regulators. Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Meta, said the company is moving toward “narrower forms of personal authentication.” It will begin wiping facial recognition data from more than 1 billion users over the next few weeks. The company listed 1.94 billion daily active users in the third quarter of 2021, more than 600 million of whom opted in to the Face Recognition setting. 

What will change? After Facebook removes the data, the app will no longer recognize faces in a photo or offer recommendations for whom to “tag,” or identify in pictures a user posts. An alternative text technology describes an image and the names of people for visually impaired users, but without facial recognition, it will not know who is in a picture. He said Facebook still believes facial recognition can be useful for user security and safety and might implement it in future products. 

Dig deeper: Listen to Myrna Brown talk to Lora Ries from The Heritage Foundation about how regulators are trying to restrict Facebook and Big Tech on The World and Everything in It podcast.