Wed 03 November 2021:
Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people.
On Tuesday, Meta announced that the face recognition system on its social media platform Facebook would be turned off in the coming weeks.
“In the coming weeks, we will shut down the Face Recognition system on Facebook as part of a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products.
The social network, whose parent company is now named Meta, said it will delete more than 1 billion people’s individual facial recognition templates as a result of this change. The company said in a blog post
As part of this change, people who have opted in to our Face Recognition setting will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos, and we will delete the facial recognition template used to identify them,” the statement said.
In 2012, Facebook acquired Israeli start-up Face.com for reportedly under $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.
The decision to shut down the system on Facebook comes after a bombardment of press reports over the last month, following the leak of a trove of internal corporate documents to news outlets, MPs, and regulators by Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistleblower.
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