Facebook introduced the facial recognition system in 2010 that automatically identifies people who appear in the photos shared by its users. With this feature, when he uploaded new photos and videos, it detected people in the media and offered tagging suggestions. In the future, the system was the source of the software that both identifies accounts that imitate someone else and explains the photos to visually impaired users.
However, this facial recognition system brought with it many privacy concerns, government investigations and many other problems. Meta has announced in an official statement that it will shut down its ten-year-old facial recognition system this month and delete all face scan data.
Meta explained:
Although facial recognition technology is sometimes useful to users in terms of security, there were too many instances of abuse. Although Facebook still sees the feature as a powerful tool, they announced that they decided to remove the feature because they took into account the concerns it created in the society.
With the announcement on Meta’s official website, it was announced that Facebook will remove its facial recognition system this month and will delete the individual facial recognition templates of more than a billion people registered so far. This change will also affect Automatic Alt Text (ATT), which creates image descriptions for visually impaired people. In the alternative texts, no information will be given about the identities of the people in the photos, and it will continue to work as it is.
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