The rebranding and the facial recognition moves come as Meta has been rocked by a series of revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen. Last week the parent company rebranded itself from Facebook in recognition of a new focus on the metaverse, a concept where the physical and digital worlds combine to allow people to lead their professional and social lives virtually, via digital representation of themselves – or avatars. Meta also owns the Instagram photo-sharing app and the WhatsApp messaging service, with 2.8 billion people using the company’s platforms, including 1.9 billion for Facebook.
Pesenti added that the decision reflected a “company-wide” move away from facial recognition technology. Complaints had also been filed with the US competition regulator and in 2012 a Facebook application to introduce facial recognition in the EU had to be withdrawn because no provision had been made to gain user consent. In 2020, Facebook’s parent company paid $650m (£477m) to settle a US class action lawsuit brought by users who claimed the firm had created and stored scans of their faces without permission. Pesenti said Facebook will encourage users to tag posts manually. If that face recognition setting is turned off, Meta said there is no faceprint to delete. If users have opted into the face recognition setting, the faceprint used to identify them will be deleted. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.” “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,” he said.
But Pesenti said the advantages needed to be weighed against “growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole”.
Meta’s vice-president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, said the technology had helped visually impaired and blind users identify their friends in images and can help prevent fraud and impersonation. In a statement, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said it would shut down facial recognition on the platform over the coming weeks and delete 1 billion facial recognition templates. The social media network has been under political, legal and regulatory pressure over its use of the software, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos – and let’s them know if a fellow user has posted a photo or video with them in it – if they have opted in to the feature. Facebook will delete the “faceprints” of more than a billion people after announcing that it is shutting down its facial recognition system due to the “many concerns” about using the technology.
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