Facebook to shut down face-recognition system, delete data on a billion people's faceprints
Menlo Park, Nov 2: Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people.
This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology's history, said a blog post Tuesday from Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook's new parent company, Meta.
More than a third of Facebook's daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognized, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates.
He said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.
More than a third of Facebook's daily active users have opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network's system.
That's about 640 million people. The setting's removal will mean deleting more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates, Pesenti said.
Facebook had already been scaling back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago.
The company in 2019 ended its practice of using face recognition software to identify users' friends in uploaded photos and automatically suggesting they tag them. Facebook was sued in Illinois over the tag suggestion feature.
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Three arrested in Gurugram for aiding Chinese cyber fraud syndicate
Gurugram (PTI): The Gurugram Cyber Police has arrested three men for allegedly providing calling support to a Chinese fraud syndicate, officials said on Wednesday.
According to the officials, a 20-port physical SIM box and a laptop were seized from them. These arrests come after a woman from Nagaland was held in connection with the same case.
The arrested accused have been identified as Karma (32) from Nagaland, and Lobsang Tsultim (33) and Ngawang Gyaltsen (35), both from Himachal Pradesh. Karma and Tsultim were arrested on February 14. Gyaltsen was intercepted on February 16 near Majnu Ka Tila in Delhi while attempting to flee to Nepal.
Police said the accused, during questioning, revealed that they were using SIM boxes to facilitate fraudulent calls targeting Indian citizens.
Karma and Lobsang Tsultim admitted to installing virtual SIM boxes in Gurugram on the instructions of a Chinese national named Tsega, they said.
These setups, which included 20 mobile phones, were capable of making over 20,000 calls a day. Tsega, allegedly used an application to contact Indian citizens for various crimes, including gaming and investment fraud, they said.
Tsultim and Gyaltsen were born in China and have lived in India as refugees for 15 years. Fluent in Chinese and Taiwanese, they communicated with Tsega via WeChat, a platform banned in India since 2020, they added.
ACP Cyber Priyanshu Dewan said the three accused were produced in court on Wednesday and have been sent to judicial custody.
"We are working to identify others involved in the network," he added.
