SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook is shutting down its facial recognition system and deleting a billion faceprints, its parent company said on Tuesday, in response to serious concerns over privacy at the scandal-hit social media network.

The announcement came as the tech giant battles one of its worst crises ever, with reams of internal documents leaked to reporters, lawmakers and US regulators.

“There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” parent company Meta said in a statement.

“Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate,” it added.

The decision shuts down a feature that automatically identified people who appeared in users’ digital photos, and that was key to the company building a sprawling, global library of faces.

Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2021