Group in crisis
Privacy concerns: Facebook is largely abolishing face recognition
Shortly after the parent company was renamed, Facebook draws attention to itself again and expresses data protection concerns about its own facial recognition software
© Armin Weigel / Picture Alliance
On Tuesday, the newly named parent company Meta announced that the online platform Facebook would largely abolish its facial recognition. The reason for this step are data protection concerns.
The online platform Facebook is largely abolishing face recognition. The US parent company Meta justified the move on Tuesday with data protection concerns. The data required for facial recognition from more than a billion users would also be deleted. “There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society and regulators are still in the process of establishing clear rules for its use,” said Meta.
Technology recognized faces on uploaded images
In view of this “persistent uncertainty”, it is appropriate to “limit facial recognition to a limited number of use cases”. It was unclear when the change would take effect. More than a third of the daily active Facebook users: According to the company, since the introduction of the system in 2010 “decided in favor of our facial recognition setting”.
The tool should serve to automatically recognize people in uploaded photos or videos and to inform those concerned about it. Recently, however, there had been increasing concerns about data protection law.
Facebook in the worst crisis since it was founded
The Californian group is currently in the worst crisis since it was founded. He is accused of not taking sufficient action against the spread of hate messages and bullying on his platforms, of violating the privacy of his users, of serving as a loudspeaker for dangerous misinformation and of harming the well-being of young Internet users.
Most recently, revelations by the whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen caused a stir. Haugen accuses her former employer of putting its own profits above the safety of its users and the common good. Facebook has firmly denied the allegations.
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