Facebook deletes a billion faceprints
Meta is shutting down Facebook's face recognition system and deleting more than a billion face templates. An industry chapter closing, from someone who lived in it.
On Tuesday Meta announced it’s shutting down the face recognition system on Facebook. It will stop automatically recognizing people in photos and videos and delete the face templates of more than a billion people who had opted in. More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users had the feature turned on.
Facebook was one of the companies that made modern face recognition. DeepFace in 2014 was the paper that told everyone in my field, including me, that hand-built approaches were finished. Tag suggestions were one of the first times face recognition ran at scale on ordinary people’s photos, years before phones unlocked with a face.
A lot has happened since then that made this decision easier. Facebook paid $650 million this year to settle a class action under Illinois’s biometric privacy law over exactly this feature. Clearview showed what face search looks like without any consent at all. IBM, Amazon and Microsoft pulled back from police sales last year. Several cities have banned government use. And people generally got more uncomfortable with a company knowing their face.
I have mixed feelings about it.
On one hand, this is the kind of decision I’ve argued for. A system that recognizes you in photos other people upload, across a network of billions, is a big concentration of power over a very sensitive piece of data. Deleting the templates removes a risk that would otherwise sit there forever, waiting for a breach, a subpoena or a policy change.
On the other hand, the feature had real benefits that are disappearing with it. It told you when someone posted a photo of you, which helped people find unauthorized uses of their image. It generated descriptions of photos for blind and low-vision users, including who was in them. Meta says it’s looking at other ways to do some of this.
And face recognition isn’t going away. It’s moving. It’s in your phone, your photo library, airport gates, and a lot of products that are less visible and less accountable than Facebook. The biggest, most scrutinized company stepping back doesn’t change what the technology can do. It changes who’s doing it, and not necessarily for the better.
Three years ago I co-founded a company to show that face recognition could be built with consent at the center. I still believe that’s possible. But the public has mostly concluded that it’s not worth the risk, and after watching this industry closely, I understand why.