Facebook has proclaimed that it will stop autonomous identification of faces of its users by putting an end to its in-house Facial Recognition (FR) Program. The decision was taken after over 639 million active users opted out of the service.
From now on, the Mark Zuckerberg’s led company faced a lawsuit against its facial recognition related data collection early this year. FB made a step forward by offering a settlement of $650 million to a data advocacy group that filed a legal suit against the use of FacioMetrics technology acquired by FB in 2016.
The social media giant was found using the new tech to help tag people assisting blind and the visually impaired people in meeting their loved ones in near future.
The social networking firm will no longer be storing any facial scans without the permission of its users.
Jerome Pesenti, the VP of Artificial Intelligence, Meta division of Facebook, has confirmed the news that his business will no longer use facial recognition software and will remove over 1 billion templates related to FR.
Note 1- In Feb this year, the world’s number one social networking giant announced it is going to integrate the face recognition tech into its smart glasses to be released in 2020. Also, the company planned to use the database of images to feed its Artificial Intelligence propelled ‘Metaverse’, an augmented reality based virtual world.
Note 2- Frances Haugen, the ex-employee of FB testified before congress appointed committee last week and leaked some internal documents related to the business and said that Mr. Zuckerberg would prefer putting profits over people and will sell their data to ad companies and data analytics firms.
