Facebook puts an end to facial recognition

Facebook has announced that it is inactivating its facial recognition system, which is used by a third of its active users, approximately 640 million people worldwide, in response to growing social concerns.

Jerome Pesenti, the Facebook operator Meta Vice President for Artificial Intelligence, reported on the decision in a blog post, in which he also described that the decision to phase out was made because of unresolved privacy concerns. Facebook's facial recognition system has been in place for a decade and helps users to tag people they know in photos more easily and quickly.

The company will shoot down facial recognition systems worldwide by the end of the year, and with it the huge database of biometric data of around one billion people will be deleted - from a Guardian. In recent years, voices against facial recognition-based identification have been growing, partly because of gender, skin colour bias and partly because of invasion of privacy.

In 2015, a class action lawsuit in Illinois launched against Facebook after the social networking giant automatically used facial recognition technology on users without their knowledge. Facebook was ordered to pay a total of 650 million dollars (roughly 195 billion forints) in damages, which were divided among the victims by the court.

Facebook is already scaling back its use of the service in the coming weeks to reduce the potential risks associated with the technology. It is not yet known what exactly the company plans to do with the facial recognition technology, but it is certain that the DeepFace algorithm will not be removed and will remain available in exceptional cases.