Meta shuts down Facebook’s face recognition system

Meta said on 2 November 2021 that it would shut down Facebook’s face recognition system, which suggested photo tags and told people when they appeared in others’ uploads, and delete the templates of more than a billion people who had opted in.

Why it mattered It was one of the largest voluntary deletions of biometric data by a technology company, after years of lawsuits and regulatory pressure. Meta left other uses open.