Facebook will shutter its facial recognition system and delete data collected from 1bn users that has been used to identify them in photos posted on the platform, citing growing regulatory scrutiny of the field.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Jerome Pesenti, vice-president of artificial intelligence at Meta, Facebook’s newly renamed parent company, said the Facebook system would be shut down “in the coming weeks” as part of what he described as “one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history”.
“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,” Pesenti said. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”