Facebook Plans to Shut Down Its Facial Recognition System

According to the company, the change affects more than a third of daily Facebook users who had facial recognition enabled for their accounts. This meant that they would be notified when new photos or videos of them were uploaded to the social network. The feature was also used to flag accounts that might impersonate someone, and was incorporated into software that described photos to blind users.

“To make this change, we had to weigh the cases where facial recognition can help against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,” said Jason Grosse, a meta-spokesperson.

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Although Facebook plans to delete more than a billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features, by December, it won’t eliminate the software that powers the system, an advanced algorithm called DeepFace. The company also did not rule out integrating facial recognition technology into future products, said Mr. Grosse.

Nevertheless, the privacy advocates welcomed the decision.

“Facebook’s exit from the facial recognition business is a pivotal moment in the growing national discomfort with this technology,” said Adam Schwartz, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights organization. “Corporate use of facial surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”

Facebook isn’t the first big tech company to pull out facial recognition software. Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM have suspended or stopped selling their facial recognition products to law enforcement in recent years while raising privacy and algorithmic bias concerns and calling for clearer regulation.

Facebook’s facial recognition software has a long and expensive history. When the software was launched in Europe in 2011, local data protection authorities said the move was illegal and the company needed consent to analyze photos of a person and extract the unique pattern of a single face. In 2015, the technology also led to the filing of the class action lawsuit in Illinois.

In the past decade, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based data protection group, has filed two complaints with the FTC about Facebook’s use of facial recognition as one of the grounds for the penalty.