From the archive. First published in December 2017. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In December 2017 Facebook launched Photo Review, a feature using facial recognition to alert you when your face appeared in a newly uploaded photo, even if nobody tagged you. At the time it was presented as giving people control over images of themselves.
What happened afterwards
The feature did not last. In November 2021 Meta announced it was shutting down the Face Recognition system on Facebook entirely, deleting the face templates of more than a billion people. The company cited regulatory uncertainty and the lack of clear rules governing the technology.
The context was expensive. In 2020 Facebook agreed to a 650 million dollar settlement in an Illinois class action over biometric data collected without consent under that state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act. Texas later pursued a much larger claim on similar grounds.
Why this belongs on a page trading site
Two reasons, both practical.
First, it is a clean example of a platform feature arriving, reshaping expectations and then being removed within four years. Anyone valuing a social media asset on the assumption that today’s features persist is making an assumption the history does not support.
Second, identity verification has gone the other way. Face recognition for tagging was switched off, while identity checks for account recovery have grown. Meta’s recovery flows now use selfie video verification in some cases. That matters because attackers routinely harvest passport and licence photos in phishing campaigns, which means they can contest an identity based recovery process against the genuine owner. We cover that in our article on how pages get stolen.
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