Why is Facebook ditching face recognition and will it delete my data?

Meta is shutting down Facebook's controversial face recognition feature and deleting the face data collected from users through the social media network, citing "growing societal concerns". But privacy campaigners are concerned that the company hasn't been clear on whether the algorithms trained on that data will be deleted. Images uploaded to Facebook have been scanned by artificial intelligence (AI) tools since 2010, giving the uploader the option of "tagging" people in the image. Meta, then known as Facebook itself, attracted criticism when the feature first launched for failing to ask permission from users, and has since struggled to align it with local privacy laws. In 2012, the company switched off face recognition for people in the EU after a German data protection commissioner said that it violated European Union law – it returned in 2018 with an explicit opt-in requirement.