Facebook will scrap its facial recognition system and delete one billion face prints, the parent company announced on Tuesday, in response to serious privacy concerns.
The company said in its blog that this change "will represent one of the largest shifts in the use of facial recognition in the history of technology."
The move "would remove more than 1 billion people from individual facial recognition templates," said Jerome Bisenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook's new parent company Meta.
The announcement came as the social network faces one of its worst crises ever, with internal documents leaked to American journalists, lawmakers and American regulatory bodies.
"There are many concerns about facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of introducing a clear set of rules governing its use," the parent company, Meta, said in a statement.
"Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition technology to a narrow set of cases is appropriate," the statement added.
The company did not clarify when this new procedure, which is used by more than a third of the site's visitors daily, will enter into force.
The statement explained that ending this system "will lead to the deletion of more than one billion face prints from the forms used."
As the social network faces an unprecedented crisis linked to a data leak, it changed the name of the parent company to "Meta" in an attempt to move beyond being a social network tainted by scandals, to its vision of virtual reality for the future.
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