Jerome Pesenti, The artificial intelligence director of Facebook’s newly named parent company, Meta, said in a blog post: “We will close Facebook’s facial recognition system as part of a company-wide measure to restrict the use of facial recognition in our products. “
Facebook introduced Face Recognition in 2010. Pesenti said the new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and the company wants to find the right balance.
“When it comes to facial recognition, its long-term role in society needs to be discussed openly and among those most affected,” Pesenti said.
“We need to weigh the positive uses of facial recognition for growing societal concerns, especially when regulators have not yet issued clear rules,” Pesenti added.
This change also affects Automatic Alternative Text (AAT), which creates image shots for the blind and visually impaired. After this change, AAT descriptions no longer contain the names of the people identified in the images, but otherwise function normally.
This change is one of the biggest changes in the use of facial recognition in the history of technology. More than a third of Facebook’s active daily users have opted for a face recognition setting and can be identified. Removing it will result in the removal of individual facial recognition models from more than a billion people.
As part of this change, people who have opted in to face recognition will no longer be automatically detected in photos and videos, and Facebook will remove the face recognition template used to identify them.
According to Pesent, this will lead to several changes: Facebook will no longer automatically recognize whether people’s faces appear in Memories, Photos, or Videos. People will no longer be able to enable face recognition for suggested tags or see the suggested tag under their own name in photos and videos where they may appear. After the change, the AAT will still be able to identify how many people are in the photo, but will no longer try to identify who each person is using face recognition.
Source: ANI
Source: The Nordic Page