Sometimes once in a while, you would get tagged by Facebook from another person's photo because the system recognises your face. Whether you find it helpful or annoying, it seems that Meta will be shutting down the Face Recognition system on Facebook. The reason being is because the company is looking to limit the technology in their products.
Although they didn't say when the deleting process begin, it will happen in the next few weeks. According to Meta, they said about a third of Facebook users actually adopt Face Recognition. But with this removal announcement, more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates will be gone forever.
Facial recognition is helpful in some ways such as verifying people's identity to prevent fraud and impersonation or even helping blind or visually impaired users to tell them if they are in an image. However, there is also a growing amount of worry that it can be abused. Hence the removal of the system to maintain privacy, control and transparency.
In summary, here's a list of changes that Meta announced today:
- Our technology will no longer automatically recognize if people’s faces appear in Memories, photos or videos.
- People will no longer be able to turn on face recognition for suggested tagging or see a suggested tag with their name in photos and videos they may appear in. We’ll still encourage people to tag posts manually, to help you and your friends know who is in a photo or video.
- This change will also impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), a technology used to create image descriptions for people who are blind or visually impaired. AAT currently identifies people in about 4% of photos. After the change, AAT will still be able to recognize how many people are in a photo, but will no longer attempt to identify who each person is using facial recognition. Otherwise, AAT will continue to function normally, and we’ll work closely with the blind and visually impaired community on technologies to continually improve AAT. You can learn more about what these changes mean for people who use AAT on the Facebook Accessibility page.
- If you have opted in to our Face Recognition setting, we 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.
Meta has not entirely thrown away the idea of facial recognition, as the company hopes to continue to engage with experts, regulators and civil society groups on the topic. Oh well, personally, I don't really mind and it was useful while it lasted. Stay tuned for more trending tech news at TechNave.com.
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