Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people.

This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technologys history, said a blog post Tuesday from Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebooks new parent company, Meta.

More than a third of Facebook's daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion peoples individual facial recognition templates.

Facebook had already been scaling back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago.

The company in 2019 ended its practice of using face recognition software to identify users friends in uploaded photos and automatically suggesting they tag them. Facebook was sued in Illinois over the tag suggestion feature.

First Published:Nov 3, 2021 8:35 AM IST