Facebook to end face-recognition system, delete data

Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition system and deleting a billion faceprints, its parent company said Tuesday, in response to serious concerns over privacy. The announcement was made by Facebook's Vice-President Artificial Intelligence Jerome Pesenti. "We’re shutting down the face recognition system on Facebook. People who’ve opted in will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos and we will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates," read the statement.The statement added, "This includes services that help people gain access to a locked account, verify their identity in financial products or unlock a personal device. These are places where facial recognition is both broadly valuable to people and socially acceptable, when deployed with care. While we will continue working on use cases like these, we will ensure people have transparency and control over whether they are automatically recognized."

"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," parent company Meta said in a statement. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate," it added.The announcement from the leading social media network was made as it battles one of its worst crises ever, with reams of internal documents leaked to reporters, lawmakers and US regulators. The social media giant battles a whistleblower crisis, it has also changed its parent company name to "Meta" in an effort to move past being a scandal-plagued social network to its virtual reality vision for the future.