Facebook to Shut Down Facial Recognition System, Delete Data of 1 Billion Users

CEO Mark Zuckerberg gives the keynote address during the Facebook F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco, Calif., March 25, 2015. Britain's competition watchdog The Competition and Markets Authority took aim at the U.S. tech giants in a report Wednesday July 1, 2020, wanting new rules to foster competition in digital advertising markets and rein in the industry's dominant players, Google and Facebook. Eric Risberg/AP Photo

Facebook Inc. on Tuesday announced it is shutting down its facial recognition system that identifies users in videos and photos, while claiming it will delete “facial recognition templates” of more than 1 billion people.

“Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook, wrote in a blog post. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”

Facebook, whose parent company rebranded itself to Meta Platforms Inc., added that about one-third of all Facebook users have signed up for the face recognition setting. The system was set up about a decade ago, initially designed to keep Facebook users engaged with the platform.

The feature, introduced in December 2010, allowed users to save time by automatically identifying them in photos. It also automatically identified individuals who appeared in others’ digital photo albums and allowed users to “tag” them, which would link their Facebook accounts to a portion of the image.

But over the years, the system has fueled privacy concerns, including instances where individuals were falsely identified, as well as lawsuits. Facebook in recent months has also faced unprecedented scrutiny from various lawmakers and regulators over its other practices.

Inside China, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employs a vast surveillance network that employs facial recognition capabilities to track dissidents, including adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual discipline that has been subject to a decades-long campaign of terror and persecution at the hands of the CCP.

In the United States, some municipalities have banned the usage of facial recognition software amid concerns of overreach and mistaken arrests. Privacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union have raised red flags about the software for years.

Meanwhile, a class-action lawsuit filed against Facebook in 2015 led to one of the largest-ever privacy lawsuit settlements when a judge earlier this year said Facebook can pay $650 million to users who claimed the firm created and stored scans of their faces without their consent.

“This change,” Facebook’s Pesenti added in the post, “will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history. More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.”

The program will be shut down in the “coming weeks,” he added, saying the move would also impact Facebook’s Automatic Alt Text technology used to create image descriptions for people who are blind.

“Every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance. In the case of facial recognition, its long-term role in society needs to be debated in the open, and among those who will be most impacted by it,” Pesenti continued. “We will continue engaging in that conversation and working with the civil society groups and regulators who are leading this discussion.”