Facebook will shut down its facial recognition system and scan millions of photos of people | Technique

Facebook announced it It will put an end to your facial recognition system It will erase facial photos of more than a billion people.

“This change will be one of the largest in the use of facial recognition in the history of technology,” wrote Jerome Bisenti, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence for Facebook’s new parent company Meta. “Removing it will delete more than a billion individual facial recognition templates.”

make it clear The company was trying to balance the arguments in favor of the positive use of technology “With societal concerns growing, especially when there are no definitive rules about it yet.”

The big change in Facebook’s stance comes after a hectic few weeks for the company. On Thursday, it was announced From now on, the company will be called Meta in an effort to refocus on generating a new technology dubbed “metaverse”.

The company is also facing its biggest PR crisis yet Documents leaked by former employee Francis Hogan It showed that Facebook was aware of the damage its products were causing and did nothing to mitigate it.

More than a third of daily Facebook users have chosen to allow the social networking system to recognize their face. That is, approximately 640 million people. But Facebook recently began phasing out the use of the system, which it introduced more than 10 years ago.

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 good for the company.” He added that the move demonstrates the strength of regulatory pressure, after the facial recognition system has been criticized for more than a decade.