Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook’s new parent company Meta, said in a blog post: “This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial-recognition usage in the technology’s history.
“More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to our 'Face Recognition' setting and are able to be recognised and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial-recognition templates.”
Pesenti said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology “against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules”.
However, it appears that Facebook is not abandoning facial-recognition entirely and will continue working on the technology, possibly with a view towards reintroducing it in future products. Pesenti wrote: "Looking ahead, we still see facial-recognition technology as a powerful tool, for example...