Facebook announced on Tuesday that it will be shutting down its controversial facial recognition system this month, the New York Times reports. The embattled social-media giant says it will be deleting the face scan data of over a billion users, a move that comes during a tumultuous time for the company, as it’s been met with fierce scrutiny over privacy and regulation concerns and is the subject of official probes.
Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta—Facebook’s newly-rebranded parent company—explained why the network was axing the system in a blog post: “We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.”
The facial-recognition system identifies people through pictures uploaded onto Facebook and suggests the users “tag” and link friends’ accounts in the photos. Growing concern about the abuse of such software—including by China’s government, as it tracks the minority Uighur population, and by law-enforcement in the United States—has prompted immense criticism.
Read it at New York Times
