In the coming weeks, Meta will be shutting down facial recognition as part of a company-wide shift to limit the use of facial recognition used within the company’s products.
Meta’s social network, Facebook, has been using facial recognition for over 10 years to encourage users to tag friends and family in photos and videos, as well as to alert people if a user uploads a photo that they’re in. In 2017, the company added some privacy constraints where it let people opt out of facial recognition.
Going forward, people will no longer be automatically recognised as Facebook will be shutting down their facial recognition system for privacy reasons.
The Artificial Intelligence-based Facial Recognition Controversy
There’s no doubt that facial recognition is highly valued in many verticals. As powerful as this technology is, there exist growing concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, regulators have yet to implement a clear set of rules that govern its use.
Meta explains that by limiting the use of facial recognition within their products to a narrow set of use cases, the technology can be used more appropriately.
As said by Facebook:
“This includes services that help people gain access to a locked account, verify their identity in financial products or unlock a personal device. These are places where facial recognition is both broadly valuable to people and socially acceptable, when deployed with care. While we will continue working on use cases like these, we will ensure people have transparency and control over whether they are automatically recognised.”
Meta’s move spawns after years of scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates, who speak of how the company has been reckless with user data. In February this year, Facebook agreed to a $650 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit in Illinois, following its facial recognition process being in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Although the company preaches that their facial recognition systems have facilitated valuable use cases, such as assisting visually impaired users, the reputational damage has continued to compound and forced the company to reassess the process.
