Facebook says goodbye to facial recognition

November 2, 2021 | 4:29 pm

Facebook social networking site Your system will shut down face recognition It will remove data collected from one billion users that was used to identify them in photos posted on a program, The British Financial Times reported.

In a blog post, Jerome Bisenti, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at dead (New company name), the system said Facebook social networking site It will be closed “in the next few weeks” as part of what she described as “one of the biggest changes in the use of facial recognition in the history of technology.”

Read also: Facebook will change its name, now it will be called Meta

‘There are many concerns about where face recognition in the community, and regulators are still in the process of introducing a clear set of rules governing its use,” Pesenti said.

And he added that amid this continuing uncertainty, Facebook social networking site It is thought appropriate to limit the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases.

The Financial Times also noted that with the removal of facial recognition, features that allow users to be automatically notified if they appear in photos or videos posted by others on the website will be terminated. a program.

The move comes as US regulators focus increasingly on space, highlighting concerns about privacy, data security and algorithmic bias, even though legislation remains incomplete in various jurisdictions.

Just last year, Facebook agreed to pay $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in Illinois that alleges the company violated state biometric privacy laws by collecting facial data for a face-tagging system without permission.

for this part, dead The recently renamed parent company of Facebook social networking site, It said it would continue to use facial recognition technology in some cases, including identity verification and account opening. said that Technique Pop-up window allowing to keep facial recognition data smart phones Or mobile devices, rather than central databases, could be “specially valuable” in the future.

Other technology companies

Facebook is not the first company to delete its face database, in 2019 Microsoft quietly deleted its database of 10 million faces, known as MS Celeb, which the company described as the largest publicly available facial recognition dataset in the world, with more than 10 million photos. for nearly 100,000 people.

In mid-2020, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM said they would not sell their facial recognition technology to law enforcement until there was clearer federal legislation.

The technical limitations of facial recognition systems are widely recognized among the academic community. For example, technology has been known to work inaccurately on women and people of color compared to men and Caucasians.

These errors led to protests against its use in the public sector by civil rights and citizen groups in Europe, Britain and the United States, leading to temporary bans on the use of the technology by police in places like Oakland, California.

In October, the European Parliament called for the ban on private facial recognition databases such as those owned by ClearviewAI, a US company whose facial recognition services are used and tested by law enforcement in the US and Europe.