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Facebook has announced that it is shutting down its face recognition system and will delete the facial data of more than one billion of its users.
Facebook said more than a third of its daily active users had previously opted into the use of face recognition technology, which is more than 600 million accounts.
Facebook Face Recognition used to analyse the photos and videos that the company thought a user was in on Facebook and it replaced the "tag suggestion" setting on the social network.
This change will also impact Automatic Alt Text (AAT), which creates image descriptions for visually impaired people. After this change, AAT descriptions will no longer include the names of people recognised in photos but will function normally otherwise.
Facial recognition has been available on Facebook since 2011, and Facebook turned the feature on automatically for more than 500 million people at the time that it debuted.
Face recognition and the features that it enables will be officially removed in coming weeks.
Recently, Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta as part of a major rebrand.
The company said it would better "encompass" what it does, as it broadens its reach beyond social media into areas like virtual reality (VR).
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