Facebook said it will be deleting 1 billion individual facial recognition templates.
Facebook, which announced that it is changing its name to Meta, said it plans to stop using facial-recognition software that automatically recognizes people in photos and videos, and will delete the data it has already gathered.
The announcement has been labeled a massive shift for the company, which is infamous for the sheer amount of data it collects from its billions of users.
But Facebook does not seem to be doing this out of the kindness of its tech-giant heart. Facebook paid out $650 million a few months ago in a class action lawsuit in Illinois for allegedly using face-tagging and biometric data without users’ permissions. Experts in privacy and tech have questioned Facebook’s biometric data practice for years.
The decade-old biometric program generates tags automatically on Facebook. It appears as a little square box over faces, asking if it should tag that individual. The data Facebook has stored makes it one of the world’s largest archives in digital photos partially because of this biometric program.
The company’s vice president for artificial intelligence Jerome Pesenti said in a released statement that Facebook will still use facial recognition technology for a “narrow set of use cases.”
However, the entire program is not being shut down. Pesenti said facial recognition technology will still be used for a “narrow set of use cases,” including accessing a locked account, verifying identity in financial products, or unlocking personal devices.
Therefore this data dump mostly pertains to social media photos being linked to users’ faces.
The latest news from the company comes following a whirlwind of bad weeks for Facebook. In the past few weeks, Facebook has had leaked internal documents, whistleblowers testifying to the government, reports on the negative effects the platforms have on the public — just to name a few.
The company has continuously said that the reports paint a false picture, but some are saying this latest move shows the company is in a bit of a panic mode.
Be the first to comment