Facebook announced it will stop using the Face Recognition system on its platform and will delete over 1 billion people’s facial recognition profiles.

Facebook is using the face recognition system to analyze photos taken of tagged users and associated users’ profile photos to automatically recognize them in photos and videos

.“In the coming weeks, we 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. 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.” reads a blog post published by Facebook.

Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook’s new parent company, Meta, added that more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to the Face Recognition setting and for this reason could be automatically recognized by the platform.

The company said that it believes face recognition is a powerful technology that could be used to protect the privacy of the users and ensure transparency and control in place, for this reason, it will continue to work on these technologies

The decision to stop using the technology is related to many concerns about the abuse of facial recognition technology in our society.

Clearly stop using this technology will impact multiple features such as the automatic recognition of users in video and photos, and the Automatic Alt Text (AAT) technology used to create image descriptions for people who are blind or visually impaired.