Facebook exits facial recognition on abuse concerns

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island－Facebook said it will shut down its facial recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

"This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology's history," wrote Jerome Pesenti, vice-president of artificial intelligence for Facebook's new parent company Meta, in a blog post on Tuesday.

He said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology "against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules". The company will delete more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates in the coming weeks.

Last week, the company renamed itself Meta to focus on new technologies for the "metaverse", a possible next iteration of the internet.

The company is also facing its biggest public relations crisis to date after leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that it has known about the harm its products cause and often did little or nothing to mitigate them.

More than a third of Facebook's daily active users have opted to have their faces recognized by the social network's system. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade ago, but gradually made it easier to opt out of the feature as it faced scrutiny from courts and regulators.

In 2019, Facebook stopped automatically recognizing people in photos and suggesting that people "tag" them. But instead of making that the default, it asked users to choose if they wanted to use its facial recognition feature.

Researchers and privacy activists have spent years raising questions about the tech industry's use of face scanning software, citing studies that found it worked unevenly across boundaries of race, gender or age. One concern has been that the technology can incorrectly identify people with darker skin.

Another problem with face recognition is that in order to use it, companies have had to create unique faceprints of huge numbers of people, often without their consent and in ways that can be used to fuel systems that track people, said Nathan Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought Facebook and other companies over the use of the technology.

Meanwhile, an Australian regulator on Wednesday ordered US facial recognition software company Clearview AI to stop collecting images from websites and destroy data collected in the country after an investigation found it breached privacy laws.

Agencies Via Xinhua