Today (November 2), Facebook announced that it will shut down its facial recognition program on the site over the "next few weeks."

Facebook's facial recognition was a feature that allowed the social network to accurately detect and tag people in uploaded photos and video clips. Facebook will still allow users to manually tag other users.

Facial recognition can be opted out (see below), but according to Facebook's own note today, "more than one-third of Facebook's daily active users" - in other words, about 1 billion people - have "opted in" to facial recognition. (I remember that you had to opt out, not opt in, but maybe the settings have changed.)

"We are removing the individual facial recognition templates of over a billion people," Facebook's official blog post said." People who have opted into our facial recognition settings will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos."

With this move, Facebook is showing that, ahem, Meta is willing to kill potential cash cows (pardon the mixed animal metaphor) in order to drive the hounds' sense of smell mad. Facebook's facial recognition works so eerily well that the company could have made billions of dollars if it had decided to license it to third parties.

"There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing clear rules governing its use," Facebook's blog post stated.

In that spirit, Facebook will use facial recognition to "help access locked accounts, verify identity on financial products, and unlock personal devices."

Aside from the fact that facial recognition was so popular that a billion people chose to participate, it also helped visually impaired Facebook users know who was in the photos posted. That service is also ending.

If you can't wait for Facebook to discontinue facial recognition, here's how to stop it now from your desktop browser.

Click the drop-down arrow in the upper right corner of the Facebook page, then click Settings & Privacy > Privacy Shortcuts > Control Facial Recognition (under Privacy in the center navigation bar) > Edit > No