World News: Talking Tech: Facebook shuttering facial recognition system

Thursday, November 4

So it looks like there will be less face in Facebook.

The social networking app will be shutting down its facial recognition system, meaning that for the 640 million or so of us Facebook users who opted in to face-recognition features, the faces in our photos, videos and memories will no longer be automatically tagged, or identified.

Starting when? In "the coming weeks," says Meta VP of artificial intelligence Jerome Pesenti.

(In case you missed the announcement – and the general jokes and additional mocking over translations –Facebook has gone so meta about the metaverse it changed its name to, yup, Meta. You can read all about it from FB Meta here. )

On the halting of facial recognition, the Lone Star state is saying whoa. In a very don't mess with Texas stance, Texas AG Ken Paxton told the company it's got to hang on to that data as it might be relevant to an antitrust suit it and 45 other states filed against Facebook in December 2020.

So what's the why behind dropping auto-tagging? Meta attributes it to "societal concerns" about facial recognition technology. (Let's not forget that last year the company formerly known as Facebook offered to settle a long-running class-action suit over this tech for $650 million.)

Is it gone for good? Probably not. They left the door open to bring it back. "Its long-term role in society needs to be debated in the open, and among those who will be most impacted by it," Pesenti said.

Maybe we can all look forward to being seen and recognized again in the Meta metaverse.

What happened in tech this week

Netflix gets its game on. The video streaming giant, which earlier in the year said it would be making mobile video games, released its first five games for Android users . Netflix subscribers can play them for free; those on iOS devices will get access in the coming months, the company said.

SpaceX launch delayed twice. The latest SpaceX launch, originally scheduled for Halloween, is now scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 6. The launch was first postponed for weather, then for a minor medical issue affecting one of the crew.

Nintendo Switch OLED demand. The video game maker's newest video game console, released Oct. 8, is essentially sold out at retail. The new console, which has a nifty 7-inch OLED display, will likely be a hard to find into 2022 as Nintendo says it will make fewer than it had expected because of the global semiconductor shortage.