Facebook has said it will no longer use facial recognition for the photos and videos that are uploaded onto its platform over growing privacy concerns.
The social media giant, which recently changed its holding company name to Meta, has offered facial recognition on its platform since 2010, with software that automatically identifies people who appear in the photos that other users upload to Facebook.
The tool was designed to make it easier for users to “tag” their friends and family, linking the tagged person’s respective Facebook account to the images. It also helped alert users if someone had uploaded a photo of them.
However, last night Facebook said it will shut down this facial recognition system for privacy reasons and in the process delete the face scan data of more than one billion users.
“The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,” Jerome Pesenti, vice-president of artificial intelligence at the social media company said.
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“There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”
The move reflects an increasing scrutiny of facial recognition technology from regulators, politicians and the public over both its uses and reliability. In China, such tech has been used to track and control Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority in the country. In the UK, the London Metropolitan Police faced criticism for its unannounced use of facial recognition outside Oxford Circus station last year. The Met used the tech to scan people against “watchlists” containing suspects wanted by police and the courts. However, researchers from the University of Essex found the software failed 80 per cent of the time and also exhibited racial bias.
Similarly in the US, police forces using facial recognition have made mistaken arrests, leading some cities such as San Francisco to ban the use of technology by police. The European parliament has also called for a ban on facial recognition in public places.
Facebook only used its facial-recognition technology on its own site and did not sell the software to third parties, but privacy campaigners have questioned how much facial data Facebook had amassed on the one billion users who use the feature.
Last year Facebook also agreed to pay $650 million to settle a lawsuit in Illinois that accused the company of breaking a state law requiring residents’ consent to use their biometric information, which includes “face geometry”.
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The move also follows the route of a number of other tech giants who have paused facial recognition work. Both Microsoft and Amazon have stopped providing police and law enforcement agencies with facial recognition tools in the US, while IBM has said it will no longer offer, develop or research facial recognition technology.
Facebook said it would not be ditching facial recognition entirely as it can still be valuable when the technology operates privately on a person’s own devices and will be considering whether to incorporate this into future products.
