Facebook ends facial recognition on its platform

It’s a small revolution: Facebook announced on Tuesday that it will no longer use, on its platform, Face recognition that identifies, since 2010, a person on photos or videos posted on the social network.

The California group, which has been embroiled in scandals over its economic model, has specified that it will delete facial recognition data accumulated on more than one billion users.

A third of users use this function

This unexpected move means that some common network tools will no longer work: when a user posts a photo, the algorithm will no longer guess the names of people in the snapshot, for example. Meta, the new parent company of Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.), however, realizes that this technology can be useful on a daily basis, especially for unlocking your smartphone screen.

in a Long blog postJerome Bisenti, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Meta, wrote that the social network is making the change because of There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society.. He added that the company still sees the software as a powerful tool, but that “Every new technology brings with it the potential for benefits and concerns, and we want to strike the right balance.”

More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users [640 millions] You choose to set up our facial recognition and it’s recognizable, and removing it will remove over a billion individual facial recognition templates. ”

Facebook is currently facing waves of accusations related to the leak of internal documents orchestrated by the whistleblower.

Computer scientist Frances Hogan asserted, before the US Congress and the European Parliament or participants in the Web Summit in Lisbon, that the social network puts its profits before the safety of users.