We will continue working on these technologies and engaging outside experts.īut the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. We believe facial recognition can help for products like these with privacy, transparency and control in place, so you decide if and how your face is used. Looking ahead, we still see facial recognition technology as a powerful tool, for example, for people needing to verify their identity, or to prevent fraud and impersonation. These features are also powered by the Face Recognition system which we are shutting down. For example, our award-winning automatic alt text system, that uses advanced AI to generate descriptions of images for people who are blind and visually impaired, uses the Face Recognition system to tell them when they or one of their friends is in an image.įor many years, Facebook has also given people the option to be automatically notified when they appear in photos or videos posted by others, and provided recommendations for who to tag in photos. Making this change required careful consideration, because we have seen a number of places where face recognition can be highly valued by people using platforms. 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. This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history. As part of this change, people who have opted in to our Face Recognition setting will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos, and we will delete the facial recognition template used to identify them. In the coming weeks, Meta will shut down the Face Recognition system on Facebook as part of a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products.
We’re shutting down the Face Recognition system on Facebook.