January 1, Facebook to shut down its facial recognition program

On Tuesday, Facebook announced an end to its facial recognition program amid growing concerns from users and regulators.

“There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” Facebook said. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”

The social media platform, whose parent company is now called Meta, said it would delete more than 1 billion individual facial recognition templates. Additionally, Facebook will no longer automatically recognize people’s faces in photos or videos.

The move comes as former employee Frances Haugen released a collection of internal company documents to news outlets and lawmakers.

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Facebook plans to shut down its facial recognition program