After a decade of use, Meta Platforms Inc. announced today that it’s shuttering its face recognition system.

That means people’s faces will no longer be recognized in photos and videos that appear on the platform, which Meta said will amount to about 1 billion individual facial recognition templates being deleted. The company said the main reason is “societal concerns.”

“Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use,” Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook, wrote in a blog post. “Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.”

Meta, then Facebook, has had problems concerning the technology for years now. In February this year, the company settled for $650 million in a privacy case in which the company was accused of using the face recognition system and other biometric data without users’ permission. Almost 1.6 million Facebook users in Illinois made a complaint, so although compensation was small for each user, the fine was still hefty for Facebook.

In any context, face recognition has always been the kind of technology that makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable. For that reason, Amazon.com Inc. recently scaled back its development of such tech, while other companies such as IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have also put a hold on similar technology.

Facebook didn’t exactly talk about the perhaps dystopian use of face recognition and said in the future it could be useful to identify people or prevent fraud. But the company also said that for now, it is better to scale the use of it back.

“We believe this has the potential to enable positive use cases in the future that maintain privacy, control and transparency, and it’s an approach we’ll continue to explore as we consider how our future computing platforms and devices can best serve people’s needs,” the company said.

Photo: Erik Mclean/Unsplash