Explained: Facebook’s face recognition system

Facebook announced that it is shutting down its face recognition system after over a decade of use. The company says it will delete the facial data of more than one billion of its users. The news marks the end of one of the largest known face recognition systems. How was Facebook using face recognition technology? […]

Facebook announced that it is shutting down its face recognition system after over a decade of use. The company says it will delete the facial data of more than one billion of its users. The news marks the end of one of the largest known face recognition systems.

How was Facebook using face recognition technology?

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The technology used to analyse the photos and videos that the company thinks a user is on Facebook and it replaced the tag suggestion setting on the social network.

What will change now?

The technology will no longer automatically recognize if your face appears in memories, photos, or videos. You will no longer be able to turn on face recognition for suggested tagging or see a suggested tag with your name in photos and videos you may appear in.

What will happen to tagged photos?

There would be no change to existing tagged photos or videos that were tagged using the technology, just that there will not be a suggested tag in the future.

How will it impact visually-impaired people?

This change will impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), which creates image descriptions for blind and visually-impaired people. After this change, AAT descriptions will no longer include the names of people recognised in photos but will function normally otherwise.

What would happen if I opted into the face recognition setting?

If you have opted into the face recognition setting, Facebook will delete the template used to identify you. If you have the face recognition setting turned off, there is no template to delete and there will be no change.

What will happen to my faceprint?

According to Facebook, it will be deleted. If you opted out of the service before this, or never opted in, or deleted your account, Facebook says the faceprint would not be retained.

Facebook started using a facial recognition system to automatically detect people in photos, videos, and memories in 2010. It drew criticism from privacy advocates and incurred hundreds and millions of dollars in fines from government regulators.

Currently, Facebook is shifting its focus to creating the metaverse and trying a whole bunch of new things concurrently.

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