Washington, November 2 (BUS) – Facebook Inc said it will shut down its facial recognition system and delete the facialprints of more than a billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.
“This change will mark one of the largest shifts in the use of facial recognition in the history of technology,” Jerome Bisenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook’s new parent company, Meta, wrote in a blog Tuesday. “Removing it will remove over a billion people from individual facial recognition templates.”
He said the company was trying to balance positive use cases for the technology “against growing societal concerns, especially since regulators have not yet provided clear rules”.
The Facebook face change follows a busy few weeks. On Thursday it announced its new name, Meta for Facebook, the company, but not the social network. She said the change will help her focus on building technology for what she envisions as the internet’s next iteration – the “metaverse”.
The company is also facing perhaps its biggest public relations crisis to date after leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Hogan showed it was aware of the damage its products were causing, and often did nothing to mitigate it.
More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have chosen to recognize their face through the social network’s platform. That’s about 640 million people.
But Facebook recently started to scale back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago.
In 2019 the company ended its practice of using face recognition software to recognize users’ friends in uploaded photos and suggest that they be automatically “tagged.”
Facebook has been sued in Illinois over its tag suggestion feature.
Kristen Martin, professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame, said the decision was “a good example of trying to make product decisions that are good for the user and the company.”
The move also demonstrates the strength of regulatory pressure, she added, as the face recognition system has been heavily criticized for more than a decade.
It appears that Meta Platforms Inc. Facebook, the parent company of Facebook, is looking at new forms of identifying people. Pesenti said Tuesday’s announcement includes a “company-wide move away from this kind of broad definition, and toward narrower forms of personal authentication.”
“Facial recognition can be especially valuable when the technology operates specifically on a person’s devices,” he wrote. “This method of on-device facial recognition, which does not require any connection of facial data to an external server, is the most common today in systems used to unlock smartphones.”
Researchers and privacy activists have spent years asking questions about the technology, citing studies that have found it works unevenly across boundaries of race, gender or age.
One concern was that the technology could incorrectly identify people with darker skin.
The problem with facial recognition, said Nathan Whistler of Americans, is that in order to use it, companies have had to create unique facialprints of huge numbers of people — often without their consent and in ways that can be used to power systems that track people. The Civil Liberties Union, which has fought Facebook and other companies over their use of the technology.
“This is a very big acknowledgment that this technology is inherently dangerous,” he said.
Meta’s cautious new approach to facial recognition follows decisions made by other US tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and IBM last year to end or halt their sales of facial recognition software to police, citing concerns about false identifications and amid a broader US reckoning about policing and racial injustice. .
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