It is in a blog post that the company announces the end of this feature: “ People who have activated it will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos and we will remove them. individual facial recognition models of over a billion people “
The company explains that it must” weigh the use positive facial recognition in relation to growing societal concerns, especially since regulators have not yet defined clear rules ”. This radical change will have an impact on several services, including Automatic Alt Text (AAT) which allows descriptions to be added to images for the visually impaired. From now on, the names of the people in the photo can no longer be added.
According to Facebook, more than a third of users use facial recognition… but how many are really aware of it? This change of course is part of a difficult framework for Facebook, which is at the center of several cases following the statements of several whistleblowers. Should this be seen as a way of trying to restore its image?
According to Facebook, more than a billion “ templates ” d ‘users will be deleted … it remains to be seen what exactly that is. Does this concern both the data and the models generated? Only the future will tell us. We also hope that the deletion will be real, permanent and on all backups, which is not always the case.