Meta sticks to facial recognition in metaverse despite Facebook stop

Despite the fact that Meta is phasing out facial recognition on Facebook and Instagram, the company will keep the algorithm and will use it for products in the metaverse, the company said. Meta promises to be open about that.

Meta believes facial recognition can play a role in the metaverse, the company tells Recode. “We believe this technology has the potential to enable positive use cases in the future. It can maintain privacy, control and transparency, and it’s one way we continue to consider for our future platforms and devices to see how best to meet the needs of users.”

In addition, Meta wants to make public how it will use its DeepFace algorithm in the future. “For all future applications of this technology, we will continue to talk about how we use it and how people can have control over these systems and their data.” Meta focuses on making hardware and software for the metaverse.

Meta, the new name of the parent company that includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced on Tuesday that it would stop using facial recognition on Facebook, Instagram and its video calling device Portal. In addition, the platform is going to remove more than a billion templates that could be used to recognize faces. The feature has been opt-in for several years and a third of users have it enabled.