TECH NEWS – More than a third of Facebook’s active users were using the technology.

The freshly rebranded Meta’s announcement mentions that Facebook was controversial for collecting user data, now preparing for the deletion of user data crossing over a billion. The regulators haven’t provided clear rules on how this technology will be used. The users who opted into the facial recognition system will no longer be recognized in photos or videos. Their facial recognition templates will also be deleted. Facebook will continue to iterate and improve facial recognition technology, and related news might arrive still in 2021.

Here’s what Facebook wrote about the changes: “Our technology will no longer automatically recognize if people’s faces appear in Memories, photos or videos. People can no longer turn on face recognition for suggested tagging or see a tag with their name in pictures and videos they may appear in. We’ll still encourage people to tag posts manually to help you and your friends know who is in a photo or video. […] If the face recognition setting is turned off, there is no template to delete, and there will be no change.

This change will also impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), a technology used to create image descriptions for people who are blind or visually impaired. AAT currently identifies people in about 4% of photos. After the change, AAT will still recognize how many people are in a picture but will no longer attempt to identify each person using facial recognition. Otherwise, AAT will continue to function normally, and we’ll work closely with the blind and visually impaired community on technologies to continually improve AAT,” Facebook wrote.

Aside from the PR talk, let’s ask the question: what stops Meta from KEEPING the technology active in the background? They can say they suspend using something, only to continue behind the scenes, secretly… and it will still be with us for security reasons (such as logging in…).

Source: WCCFTech