Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition system, affecting over a billion people

From CNET: Facebook will shut down its facial recognition system this month and delete the face scan data of more than 1 billion users, the company said Tuesday. It cited societal concerns and regulatory uncertainty about facial recognition technology as the reasons.

More than one-third of the app's daily active users have opted into its Face Recognition setting, the social network noted in a blog post.

"There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," wrote Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook's newly named parent company, Meta. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."

Pesenti said the change also means that automatic descriptions of photos for blind and visually impaired people will no longer include the names of people in the images.

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