Facebook has announced a major update that could affect everyone with a profile.
The social media giant has said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than one billion people.
Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook's new parent company Meta, said in a blog post: "This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology's history.
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"More than a third of Facebook's daily active users have opted in to our Face Recognition setting and are able to be recognised, and its removal will result in the deletion of more than a billion people's individual facial recognition templates."
He said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology "against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules".
Facebook had already been scaling back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago.
In 2019, the company ended its practice of using face recognition software to identify users' friends in uploaded photos and automatically suggesting they "tag" them.
Facebook was sued in Illinois in the US over the tag suggestion feature.
Recently, Facebook revealed their new company name and brand, Meta.
The move was designed to represent the firm's broadening business portfolio beyond social networking, particularly as it pushes on with plans to develop the so-called metaverse, an online world where people can meet, play and work virtually, often using VR headsets.
But it also comes amid a string of controversies that have followed the company's various ventures, particularly the main Facebook platform, Instagram and WhatsApp.
While the wider company name is being rebranded to Meta, the core Facebook service will remain unchanged.
This is similar to how Google created a new parent company name, Alphabet, in 2015 to represent its shift beyond simply being a search engine.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the current brand is "so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future".
He said in a virtual conference: "Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we're building towards.
"We just announced that we were making a fundamental change to our company. We're now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments, one for our family of apps, and one for our work on future platforms.
"And as part of this, it is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do to reflect who we are and what we hope to build.
"I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta."
As part of the plan, the Oculus brand, used for the company's virtual reality products, will be retired from next year.
Incoming chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, who currently heads up AR and VR for the firm, said that starting in early 2022, Oculus Quest from Facebook will be changed to Meta Quest, while the Oculus App will become the Meta Quest App.
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