Facebook recently announced it is shutting down Meta, its facial recognition program, which is likely to affect one-third of the daily active users of the social media platform.
A USA TODAY report said, according to a company official, FB's shuttering the said program and deleting over one billion "faceprints" of users.
Vice President of Artificial Intelligent at Meta, Jerome Pesenti said, this move means that roughly 640 million people who have opted into the facial recognition option of the social network will no longer be automatically recognized in images and videos. Incidentally, Meta is Facebook's newly named parent company, as indicated in a blog post.
The automatic "alt text system" of Facebook, which uses facial recognition and artificial intelligence, is also affected to provide visually impaired or blind with descriptions of images that let them know when they, or a friend, is in an image.
Reason for Shutting Down the Program
Pesenti explained Facebook is taking action as the many particular instances where facial recognition can be helpful should be weighed against growing concerns about this technology's use, in general.
On top of the societal concerns about how facial recognition is being used, regulators remain in the process of giving a clear set of rules that govern its use, added the META official.
Amid the current uncertainty, he said, they believe that restricting the use of the program to narrow a set of use cases is appropriate.
How Facial Recognition Works
One may be good at recognizing faces. He probably finds it easy to determine the face of a friend or loved one or an acquaintance. More so, he may be familiar with these people's facial features like their eyes, mouth, and nose, among others.
While that's how a facial recognition system works, it's different with a grand, algorithmic scale. Where one sees a face, recognition technology is seeing data.
Such data can be stored and accessed. For example, 50 percent of all American adults have their images saved in one or more facial-recognition databases that law enforcement agencies can search, a Norton report said.
This same report indicates four steps involved in a face recognition system. These include:
1. A Picture of a Person's Face Captured from a Photo or Video
His face might appear the only one or alone in a crowd. As such, his image may show he is looking straight ahead or nearly in profile.
2. Geometry of the face is Read by Recognition
Key factors to this procedure comprise the distance between the eyes and the distance between the forehead and chin.
Essentially, the software determines facial landmarks. One system can identify more than 60 of these landmarks, which is a key to distinguishing one's face. This then results in a facial signature.
3. Facial Signature
Described as a mathematical formula, a facial signature is compared to a database of identified faces. For example, at least 117 million Americans have images of their faces in a single or more police database. A 2018 report indicates that the FBI has had access to more than 400 million facial images for searches.
4. Determination Has Been Created
Here, the faceprint may match that of an image saved in the database of the facial recognition system.
Backing From Consumer Privacy Groups
A separate USA TODAY report specified that consumer privacy groups considered the decision of Facebook, a good one for its users.
According to Alan Butler, Electronic Privacy Information Center president, and executive director, it is welcome news that the company is not just shutting down the program on its platform but is deleting the facial scan data, as well, that it has inappropriately gotten from over a billion users.
For quite some time now, Internet users have been suffering from personal data abuses at the urges of Facebook and other platforms.
This action comes just a few days after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, changed the parent company's name to Meta as part of its strategy to concentrate in the metaverse, a similar TechCrunch via Yahoo! News report said.
Report about Facebook's recent decision is shown on Reuter's YouTube video below:
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