Facebook announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its 10-year-old facial recognition system and deleting the face prints of over 1 billion people after coming under pressure for the program’s privacy implications and legal and regulatory risks.
The facial-recognition software would automatically identify and save the faces of people who were in other users’ photo albums and suggest that the person who posted the photo “tag” everyone else in them, thereby linking the people’s Facebook accounts to the image. Facebook has one of the biggest collections of digital photos in the world thanks to the software.
“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 at Meta, Facebook’s new parent company, said in a blog post. “More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.”
Facebook used the facial recognition tool for its own website and did not sell its software or data to third parties outside the company. Nevertheless, the tool started to present problems for the company in terms of privacy and regulatory standards.
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The Federal Trade Commission fined the social media giant a record $5 billion due to privacy complaints in 2019 that involved the facial recognition tool, and the company also paid $650 million to settle a lawsuit in Illinois that accused Facebook of breaking a state law saying that users in the state consent to the use of their biometric information, including their face.
Facial recognition technology has come under increasing scrutiny in the past few years as its power and scope have heightened, particularly due to fears of the government abusing the technology and mistakenly arresting people.
A large coalition of advocacy groups focused on civil and human rights made a push in June to ban the police from using facial recognition technology that it said could create an Orwellian surveillance state. The groups said that most people do not know when they are being tracked by the technology and are having their privacy infringed upon without reasonable suspicion of criminal wrongdoing.
More than half of all adults in the United States are already in face recognition databases used for criminal investigations, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology.
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Some local governments and large corporations have already chosen to ban the controversial technology, trying to set an example for others to follow.
