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.
Let the Truth be known. If you read VB and like VB, please be a VB Supporter and Help us deliver the Truth to one and all.
Expelled Cong MLA Mamkootathil gets bail in sexual assault case
Pathanamthitta(Kerala) (PTI): A Kerala court on Wednesday granted bail to expelled Congress MLA Rahul Mamkootathil in the third sexual assault case against him, in which he was arrested earlier this month.
The bail was granted by the Pathanamthitta District Sessions Court, which was considering an appeal filed by the MLA against a judicial magistrate's court that had denied him relief, stating that the allegations against him were serious and that he had "similar antecedents".
The third sexual assault case was registered against the Palakkad MLA under Sections 376 (rape) and 506(1) (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), following a complaint lodged by a woman from Kottayam district on 8 January. He was arrested in the case on January 11 in Palakkad.
The Kerala High Court and a sessions court in Thiruvananthapuram had earlier protected the MLA from arrest in the first two sexual assault cases, which were registered based on complaints from two different women.
