Facebook's commitment to shut down facial recognition technology does not apply to metaverse products
Meta says it will continue to explore the technology
Facebook's parent company Meta has no plans to hold back its use of facial recognition technology in its future products.
In a statement to Vox Recode, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse clarified that Facebook's recent commitment to shut down facial recognition technology does not apply to its metaverse products, and that the firm was actually experimenting with different ways to introduce biometrics technology into the metaverse equation.
Grosse said that the facial recognition technology "has the potential to enable positive use cases in the future that maintain privacy, control, and transparency".
He added that Meta would continue to explore the technology as the company considers how its "future computing platforms and devices can best serve people's needs".
Meta has not ruled out using its DeepFace AI technology in future, which powers its photo-tagging facial recognition feature.
Grosse said the company will keep the public informed about the potential future applications of such technologies, including their intended use and "how people can have control over these systems and their personal data."
Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it was shutting down the facial recognition feature on its platform that enabled to automatically recognise people who appeared in other users' photo albums.
Using the feature, users could easily "tag" others in their photos with just a click.
Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, said that there are currently many concerns about the place of such systems in the society and that the company wants "to find the right balance" with the technology.
Pesenti said that regulators are yet to finalise a clear set of rules governing the use of facial recognition systems, and amid this ongoing uncertainty, Facebook believes limiting the use of the technology to "a narrow set of use cases" will be appropriate.
As part of the change, the users who have opted in to Face Recognition setting on Facebook will no longer be automatically identified in photos and videos.
The removal will also result in the deletion of more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates.
Facial recognition technology has been the subject of much negative attention in recent years. Critics cite multiple studies that have found the technology can suffer from race-, age- and ethnicity-related biases, and could lead to human rights abuses.
They also argue that the technology has the potential to become an invasive form of surveillance.
Facebook last year agreed to pay a $650 million in settlement after a lawsuit claimed the tagging tool breached Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act.
The organisation's decision to shut down facial recognition system comes days after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was rebranding itself as Meta - dividing into two segments, with each reporting its own financial results.
Family of Apps (FoA) will include Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and other services, while Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), will concern "augmented and virtual reality related consumer hardware, software and content".
Zuckerberg said that change would help the company to turn its focus away from social media and towards the metaverse, or 'embodied internet'.
The word metaverse is a term borrowed from science fiction. It refers to a virtual world where people can move between different devices and communicate in a virtual environment.
The company's Oculus VR headsets and service are a key part of realising that vision, and the company also plans to invest $50 million to collaborate with other organisations to responsibly build the virtual world technology.
"In the coming years, I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company," Zuckerberg said in July.
Meta is reportedly developing hyper-realistic avatars that people will operate as they travel through the metaverse.
The firm also plans to release a new VR headset next year, which will reportedly feature sensors to track peoples' eye and facial movements.