Facebook is set to end the use of facial recognition software.
The social media site has announced it will no longer use facial recognition software to identify faces in photographs and videos, amid growing concerns about the ethics surrounding the use of the technology.
Regulators have not yet provided a clear set of rules over how it should be used, and so Facebook – whose parent company, which was also called Facebook, recently changed its name to Meta – have decided to axe all use of the software.
In a blog post, Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at the firm said: "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."
Until now, users of the social platform could choose to opt into the feature which would scan their face in pictures and notify them if someone else on the platform had posted a picture of them.
The news comes after Meta faced a barrage of criticism over Facebook’s use of face recognition and the impact it has on users.
In 2019, a US government study suggested facial recognition algorithms were far less accurate at identifying African American and Asian faces compared to Caucasian faces.
And last year, Facebook also settled a long-running legal dispute about the way it scans and tags photos, with the platform paying $550m (£421m) to a group of users in Illinois who argued its facial recognition tool was in violation of the state's privacy laws.
