Facebook is killing off this popular but creepy feature — here's what that means for you

Facebook is killing off this pop merely creepy characteristic — here's what that means for y'all

Smiling blonde woman wearing glasses and a floppy hat looking at her phone with Facebook notification icons superimposed on the image.

(Paradigm credit: Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock)

In a surprise move, Facebook announced today (Nov. 2) that it was shutting down its onsite facial-recognition program, constructive over "the coming weeks."

Facebook's Face Recognition is the feature that allows the social network to accurately spot and tag persons in uploaded photographs and video clips. Facebook volition still let its users tag other users manually.

Android scam apps with 10M downloads deleted by Google — what to do
The best identity theft protection services
Plus: macOS Monterey is bricking Intel Macs — what you demand to know

Y'all tin opt out of Face Recognition (meet below), but Facebook'due south ain memo today said that "more than a third of Facebook'southward daily active users" — in other words, almost a billion people — had "opted into" Confront Recognition. (We recollect having to opt out, not opt in, but perhaps the settings changed.)

"Nosotros will delete more a billion people's private facial recognition templates," the official Facebook web log mail said. "People who accept opted in to our Face Recognition setting will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos."

Why impale off Face up Recognition?

With this move, Facebook, ahem, Meta, is demonstrating that it's willing to kill off a potential greenbacks cow to throw the hounds off the scent (alibi the mixed animal metaphors). Facebook's Face up Recognition works creepily well, and it could have made the visitor billions if they'd e'er decided to license it to third parties.

Only with the company under sustained burn from politicians and regulators across the world, a huge enshroud of internal documents leaked to the press, and the corporate pivot to virtual reality that accompanied the name change to "Meta" last week, facial recognition may have seemed like a poison pill that would just get Facebook/Meta into further trouble.

"There are many concerns about the identify of facial recognition technology in club, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," said the Facebook web log post. "Among this ongoing dubiousness, nosotros believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate."

So in that spirit, Facebook will still use facial recognition to "help people proceeds access to a locked account, verify their identity in financial products or unlock a personal device."

Aside from the fact that Face up Recognition was popular enough then that a billion people chose to participate in it, information technology also helped Facebook users with visual impairments know who was in a posted photo. That service will besides exist discontinued.

How to plow off Facebook's Face Recognition

If yous can't await for Facebook to kill Face up Recognition, here's how to opt out of it right now from a desktop browser.

Click the driblet-down arrow in the elevation right of your Facebook folio and click Settings & Privacy > Privacy Shortcuts > Command face recognition (in the eye navigation bar under Privacy) > Edit > No.

Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom'southward Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He'due south been rooting around in the information-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and even moderated a panel discussion at the CEDIA home-technology briefing. Yous can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.