Many of their users may not have realised it, but for a number of years there was a pretty good chance that Facebook was carefully examining their faces.
Indeed, if a Facebook user’s “Facial Recognition” privacy option was set to enabled, the social media platform was using its cutting-edge AI technology to create a biometric template of their face. A template so detailed that Facebook could use it to automatically identify an individual person when detected in a photo uploaded to the platform.
It was this facial recognition technology which is how Facebook was able to – for many users – automatically suggest ‘friend tags’ in photos.
Perhaps inevitably, many users were not happy with this behind-the-scenes mapping of their faces, and that’s why we published an article at the start of the year about how to disable the feature.
Privacy has been a hot topic for a number of years as platforms like Facebook learn more and more about their users while consuming vast amounts of data about them including their likes, dislikes, online surfing habits, where they live and who they interact with. This has resulted in numerous backlashes against such data-sucking websites, including and especially Facebook.
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It is this backlash that has most likely resulted in Facebook abandoning the facial recognition feature – a feature that consumes one of the most personal aspects about a user, information about their own face. From the Meta blog –
We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.
Facebook goes on to say –
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. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.
Services and features impacted by the closure include the auto-tag suggestion feature, the automatic alt text system for the visually impaired, and the notification users can get if Facebook believes a photo of that user has been uploaded to the platform.
Users who were subscribed to the feature will have their biometric templates deleted.