Facebook to shut down face recognition for photo tagging

Facebook, which has changed its company name to Meta, has announced plans to shut down the facial recognition system used to tag people in photos and videos posted on the platform for about a decade. “This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history,” said Jerome Pesenti, Meta’s vice-president, artificial intelligence. Facebook has built possibly the world’s largest repository of digital photos anywhere in the world, and the corresponding facial recognition algorithms at work all these years give it precise data of who is who. Earlier this year, Facebook paid $650 million in settlement for a lawsuit that said the company’s face recognition algorithms violated the biometric privacy law in the US state of Illinois.