Facebook suspends facial recognition service due to privacy concerns

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it is shutting down its facial recognition system and deleting facial fingerprint data for one billion users, in response to privacy concerns.

The social media giant’s announcement came at a time when the company is experiencing one of its worst crises ever, after internal documents were leaked to US reporters, lawmakers and regulators.
“There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of introducing a clear set of rules governing its use,” the parent company, Meta, said in a statement.

“We believe, amid continued uncertainty around the service, that limiting facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate,” the company added.

Shutting down this system “will result in the removal of more than one billion people from individual facial recognition templates,” the statement said.

The statement did not specify when the changes would take effect, but if that happens, users will feel it on a large scale, as the service is used daily by more than a third of Facebook users.

Earlier, the parent company changed the company’s name to “Meta” in an effort to move beyond being a scandal-ridden social network to its vision of virtual reality for the future.