The decade-old facial recognition system was a feature that had fueled privacy concerns, a class-action lawsuit, government investigations, and regulatory hurdles.
Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, wrote in a blog post Tuesday that the social media giant was getting rid of the program because of “many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society.”
Pesenti added that the company still found usefulness with the software, but wanted to strike “the right balance” in using it.
The initial facial recognition feature was introduced in 2010 so that Facebook users could automatically get suggestions on who to tag in an image with a click, linking that person’s Facebook account with the image.
The feature was meant to save users time, but it quickly made Facebook one of the largest stockpiles of digital photos in the world.
Facebook is not the first big tech company to get rid of its facial recognition software.
IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft have halted or stopped selling their facial recognition products altogether to law enforcement in recent years, while expressing privacy concerns and pushing for more regulation.
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