Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition program and deleting more than 1 billion users’ faceprints, a company official said Tuesday.
The move means more than one-third of Facebook’s daily active users — about 640 million people — who have opted into the social network’s facial recognition option no longer will be automatically recognized in photos and videos, said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, the newly named parent company of Facebook, in a blog post.
Also affected: Facebook’s automatic alt text system, which uses facial recognition and artificial intelligence to give those who are blind or visually impaired descriptions of images that let them know when they or a friend are in an image.
