Apply enough pressure and even Facebook will bend.
Less than a week after Facebook was renamed Meta, he said that it disables face recognition on Facebook due to "growing social concerns".
So those who have chosen the face recognition system will no longer be recognized in videos and photos. According to the company more than one billion people in individual face recognition standards will be deleted.
The move also means that the Automatic Alt Text feature, which creates image descriptions for the blind and visually impaired, will no longer include the names of people it recognizes in photos.
The change will take effect in the coming weeks.
While it may seem like a huge victory for privacy activists, Facebook is likely to reactivate some of these features in the future when regulators stop working and decide what the company's future holds.
"It's great news for Facebook users," the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in response to the news, "and the global movement pushing this technology."
Meta's decision did not come out of nowhere. Facebook is under pressure to limit face recognition technology from lawmakers, courts and privacy activists around the world, something a name change in Meta cannot fix.
Meta, in other words, decided to anticipate situations but left windows open for the future. So do not applaud Mark Zuckerberg for doing the right thing. Thank the activists and lawmakers who pushed him to do so.
