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 system facial recognition will no longer be recognized in video and photos. According to the company more than one billion people in individual facial 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.
Although it seems like a huge win for activists protectionof privacy, Facebook will likely re-enable some of these features in the future, once regulators stop messing around and decide what the future holds for the company.
“This is great news for Facebook users,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in response to the news, “and for 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 while leaving windows open for the future. So don't applaud him Mark Zuckerberg who did the right thing. Credit the activists and lawmakers who pushed him to do so.