Time.news – Facebook in the coming weeks will close its facial recognition system that automatically identifies users in photos and videos. This was announced by the company in an official note published on the blog of the Meta holding company.
In the note, Jerome Pesenti, vice president of Facebook’s artificial intelligence division cites the company’s growing concerns about the use of this technology. “Regulators are still intent on providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” Pesenti writes, “and in this uncertainty we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a limited set of cases is appropriate.”
The decision therefore puts an end to a function that was introduced in December 2010 to allow Facebook users to shorten the time it takes to ‘tag’ people in a photo. Facial recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users’ photo albums and prompted users to ‘tag’ them all with one click, linking their accounts to the image.
However, this software allowed Facebook to build one of the largest digital photo archives in the world, in part thanks to this software. Facial recognition technology, which in the last 15 years has greatly improved in accuracy and pervasiveness, has always been at the center of public debate for its implications on people’s privacy and for the possibility it gives governments and law enforcement agencies to be able to use these archives for purposes that may violate human rights.
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