Clearview AI, the surveillance firm notoriously known for harvesting some 20 billion face scans off of public social media searches, said it may bring its technology to schools and other private businesses. In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, the company revealed it's working with a U.S. company selling visitor management systems to schools. That reveal came around the same time as a horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas that tragically left 19 children and two teachers dead. Though Clearview wouldn't provide more details about the education-linked companies to Gizmodo, other facial recognition competitors have spent years trying to bring the tech to schools with varying levels of success and pushback. New York state even moved to ban facial recognition in schools two years ago.

On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it was ending its Face Recognition system on the app and rolling back the technology in the coming weeks. In a press release, Jerome Pesenti, VP of artificial intelligence at Meta (the new name for Facebook's parent company), said that the shutting down of the Face Recognition system and the imminent deletion of Facebook's library of facial recognition templates is "a company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification, and toward narrower forms of personal authentication." Soon, Facebook will no longer automatically recognize people's faces in Memories, photos or videos uploaded to the app, or give suggestions for tagging who's in a photo or video. It will also not be able to notify users if they appear in other photos or videos across the site. However, users can still manually tag friends in photos.

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.

Facebook has announced it is deleting about 1bn "faceprints" it used as part of a facial recognition system for photo tagging, citing concerns with the technology. Meta, the company formally known as Facebook, announced on Tuesday it would end its use of facial recognition technology in the coming weeks. A third of Facebook's users, or about 1 billion people, had opted into the service, Meta's vice-president of artificial intelligence Jerome Pesenti said. So is the company really concerned about people's privacy, or is it just a public relations move? When people opted in to allowing the use of facial recognition, Facebook scanned a "faceprint" of that user and used it to find photos and videos of them on the platform, and suggested tagging them.

Facebook announced today that they will no longer use the Face Recognition system on their platform and will be deleting over 1 billion people's facial recognition profiles. Facebook's Face Recognition system analyzes photos taken of tagged users and associated users' profile photos to build a unique identifier or template. This template is then used to identify users in uploaded photos or automatically tag people in Memories. Now, a week after their rebranding as Meta, Facebook has announced that they are doing away with the Face Recognition feature and deleting all profile templates created by the system. "But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole," said Jerome Pesenti, VP of Artificial Intelligence, in an announcement published today.

Facebook will delete the "faceprints" of more than a billion people after announcing that it is shutting down its facial recognition system due to the "many concerns" about using the technology. The social media network has been under political, legal and regulatory pressure over its use of the software, which automatically identifies users in photos and videos if they have opted in to the feature. In a statement, Facebook's parent company, Meta, said it would shut down facial recognition on the platform over the coming weeks and delete 1 billion facial recognition templates. Meta's vice-president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, said the technology had helped visually impaired and blind users identify their friends in images and can help prevent fraud and impersonation. But Pesenti said the advantages needed to be weighed against "growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole".

You might've heard about face recognition and its different applications. A face recognition system can identify people in videos or static images to put it in simple terms. Many fields use the technology for surveillance and tracking people. Some countries are using face recognition systems more widely than others. But while you may hear about it more frequently now, the technology has been in existence for decades.

The data protection authority in Hamburg, Germany, for instance, last week issued a preliminary order saying New York-based Clearview must delete biometric data related to Matthias Marx, a 32-year-old doctoral student. The regulator ordered the company to delete biometric hashes, or bits of code, used to identify photos of Mr. Marx's face, and gave it till Feb. 12 to comply. Not all photos, however, are considered sensitive biometric data under the European Union's 2018 General Data Protection Regulation. The action in Germany is only one of many investigations, lawsuits and regulatory reprimands that Clearview is facing in jurisdictions around the world. On Wednesday, Canadian privacy authorities called the company's practices a form of "mass identification and surveillance" that violated the country's privacy laws.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation and more than a dozen other civil rights groups have objected to Customs and Border Protection's plan to expand use of facial recognition at border entry and exit points. The Department of Homeland Security proposed a rule change last month that would authorize CBP to photograph foreign nationals at any point of departure, including airports and seaports. Those captured images can be used to create faceprints. Under the current rules, non-citizens may only be required to provide biometric data at land ports and up to 15 airports and seaports as part of pilot programs. DHS aims to lift the limit on the number of entry points where the program can take place and to remove references to "pilot programs" from the rules.

By Kashmir Hill Floyd Abrams, one of the most prominent First Amendment lawyers in the country, has a new client: the facial recognition company Clearview AI. Litigation against the startup "has the potential of leading to a major decision about the interrelationship between privacy claims and First Amendment defenses in the 21st century," Abrams said in a phone interview. He said the underlying legal questions could one day reach the Supreme Court. Clearview AI has scraped billions of photos from the internet, including from platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram, and sells access to the resulting database to law enforcement agencies. When an officer uploads a photo or a video image containing a person's face, the app tries to match the likeness and provides other photos of that person that can be found online.