(Reuters) – Facebook Inc FB.O announced on Tuesday that it is shutting down its facial recognition system, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos, citing growing society concerns about its use of this technology.
“Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing their use,” said Jerome Pesenti, Facebook’s vice president of artificial intelligence, in a blog. “Amidst this continuing uncertainty, we believe it is appropriate to limit the use of facial recognition to a restricted set of use cases.”
The company, which last week renamed itself Meta, said more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted for the facial recognition setting on the social media site, and the change will now delete the “facial recognition templates” from more than 1 billion people.
The removal will be implemented globally and should be completed by December, a Facebook spokesman said.
Facebook added that its automatic alt-text tool, which creates image descriptions for people with low vision, will no longer include the names of recognized people in photos after face recognition is removed, but will function normally.
The removal of facial recognition by the world’s largest social media platform comes at a time when the tech industry has faced a reckoning in recent years amid criticism that the technology could falsely identify people as part of crimes or favor white faces instead of colored people.
Facebook is also under intense scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over user safety and a wide range of abuses on its platforms.
(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas and Elizabeth Culliford in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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