By disabling the facial recognition system on Facebook, more than a billion IDs will be removed

Facebook is disabling its facial recognition system, and in parallel, Facebook will remove more than 1 billion human faces from its system, Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook’s parent company Meta, announced on Tuesday.

The company said that one in three daily active users was using the facial recognition feature, or roughly 640 million people, and now all facial recognition templates for those users will be removed.

Regarding the background of the decision, Pesenti revealed in his post that Facebook is simultaneously considering the positive benefits of the technology in parallel with the growing social concerns, especially since the authorities have not yet established clear rules on such sensitive privacy issues. .

Regardless, Facebook hasn’t been actively developing this feature in recent years, and in fact, the downsizing of the technology has started a long time ago. In 2019, the practice of using facial recognition software to identify users’ acquaintances in uploaded photos was eliminated. The ability to automatically tag faces in photos has also been removed. Facebook has also been sued in the state of Illinois for this latest practice.

Some cities in the US have previously initiated a ban on the use of facial recognition software by law enforcement and other government agencies. In 2019, San Francisco was the first city in the US to ban the use of technology to protect privacy and civil liberties. (AP)