The move comes amid growing concerns over the misuse of facial recognition technology.

Facebook has announced that it will stop using its facial recognition technology to identify people in photos and videos, as well as delete facial recognition data of over 1 billion people.

The move comes amid growing concerns over facial recognition technology and its misuse by private companies, law enforcement agencies and governments around the world.

“This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history,” Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, said in a blog post. “It reflects a need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns.”

In 2010, Facebook introduced a new feature to automatically tag people in photos and videos, which used the company’s in-house facial recognition algorithm to detect faces. Over the years, Facebook has come under criticism from privacy activists and has faced regulatory scrutiny for using its facial recognition tech.

ClearView AI, a facial recognition start-up that provided its services to law enforcement agencies stirred up controversy in 2019, when it was revealed that it was mining publicly available images, especially on Facebook to enrich its database and train its AI. The company then sold its software exclusively to law enforcement agencies around the world, claiming that it would help solve crimes much faster.

However, the practice has drawn wide criticism and ClearView AI has now been ordered to delete all its facial recognition data by the Australian privacy regulator.

More and more countries are taking the misuse of facial recognition technology seriously, with major cities and some states in the United States have already banned the use of the technology.

Facebook is currently facing immense regulatory scrutiny from countries around the world for its alleged business practices that prioritise profits over public safety.

Over the last few months, a vast trove of leaked internal company documents, called the "Facebook Files" have revealed wide-ranging issues faced by the company. From its inability to stop the spread of misinformation to accelerating violence in India. Documents also reveal that the company knew Instagram was toxic for teenage girls and yet chose to take no action.