Facebook is killing off this popular but creepy feature — here's what that means for you

Facebook is killing off this pop but creepy feature — here's what that means for y'all

Smiling blonde woman wearing glasses and a floppy hat looking at her phone with Facebook notification icons superimposed on the image.

(Paradigm credit: Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock)

In a surprise move, Facebook announced today (Nov. ii) that information technology was shutting down its onsite facial-recognition programme, effective over "the coming weeks."

Facebook's Face Recognition is the characteristic that allows the social network to accurately spot and tag persons in uploaded photographs and video clips. Facebook will still allow its users tag other users manually.

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Yous can opt out of Face Recognition (run into beneath), but Facebook's own memo today said that "more than a third of Facebook'due south daily active users" — in other words, near a billion people — had "opted into" Face up Recognition. (We remember having to opt out, non opt in, but maybe the settings changed.)

"We volition delete more than a billion people's private facial recognition templates," the official Facebook web log post said. "People who accept opted in to our Face Recognition setting volition no longer exist automatically recognized in photos and videos."

Why impale off Face Recognition?

With this move, Facebook, ahem, Meta, is demonstrating that it's willing to kill off a potential cash cow to throw the hounds off the olfactory property (excuse the mixed animal metaphors). Facebook'south Face Recognition works creepily well, and it could have made the company billions if they'd ever decided to license it to tertiary parties.

But with the visitor under sustained fire from politicians and regulators across the world, a huge cache of internal documents leaked to the press, and the corporate pivot to virtual reality that accompanied the proper name change to "Meta" terminal calendar week, facial recognition may have seemed similar a poison pill that would just get Facebook/Meta into further trouble.

"At that place are many concerns nigh the place of facial recognition technology in gild, and regulators are still in the process of providing a articulate set of rules governing its apply," said the Facebook blog mail service. "Amid this ongoing dubiousness, nosotros believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."

So in that spirit, Facebook will nevertheless employ facial recognition to "help people gain access to a locked account, verify their identity in fiscal products or unlock a personal device."

Bated from the fact that Face Recognition was popular enough then that a billion people chose to participate in information technology, it too helped Facebook users with visual impairments know who was in a posted photo. That service will also be discontinued.

How to turn off Facebook'south Face up Recognition

If you tin't wait for Facebook to kill Face Recognition, here's how to opt out of it right at present from a desktop browser.

Click the drop-downward arrow in the top right of your Facebook folio and click Settings & Privacy > Privacy Shortcuts > Control face up recognition (in the center navigation bar under Privacy) > Edit > No.

Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-booty driver, lawmaking monkey and video editor. He'south been rooting around in the information-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and even chastened a console give-and-take at the CEDIA domicile-applied science conference. Y'all can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.