Facebook turns off facial recognition

Citing growing concerns about the use of facial recognition, Facebook is shutting down its system, which identifies users automatically in photographs and videos.

"Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," noted Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."

The removal of face recognition by the world's largest social media platform comes with the tech sector facing a reckoning over the ethics of the technology.

Critics say facial recognition technology, popular with retailers and operators of hospitals and other operations for security purposes, could compromise privacy, target marginalized groups and normalize intrusive surveillance.

IBM has ended facial recognition product sales, and Microsoft and Amazon have suspended sales to police.

And Facebook has been under intense scrutiny from regulators and legislators over user safety and a wide range of abuses on its platforms.

The company, which last week renamed itself Meta Platforms, said more than one third of Facebook's daily active users have opted into the face-recognition setting. But the change will now delete the facial recognition templates of more than one billion people.

The removal will roll out globally and is expected to be complete by next month.

Privacy advocacy and digital rights groups welcomed the move.

Alan Butler, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said: "For far too long internet users have suffered personal data abuses at the whims of Facebook and other platforms."

Adam Schwartz, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said although Facebook's action followed moves by other firms it could mark a "notable moment in the national turning away from face recognition."

Facebook added that its automatic alt text tool, which creates image descriptions for visually impaired people, will no longer include the names of people recognized in photos after the removal of face recognition but will otherwise function normally.

Still, Facebook, cofounded by Mark Zuckerberg, did not rule out using facial recognition technology in other products, stating it had value as a "powerful tool."

But the company's facial recognition software has long been the subject of scrutiny.

The US Federal Trade Commission, for example, included it among the concerns when it fined Facebook US$5 billion (HK$38.9 billion) to settle privacy complaints in 2019.

And a judge this year approved a US$650-million settlement by Facebook in a class action in Illinois over claims it collected and stored biometric data of users without proper consent.