Meta, the largest social media company in the world, has begun shutting down Facebook’s facial recognition features. Facebook’s Face Recognition system allowed those who opted in to be recognized and tagged in any photo they were in that was uploaded to Facebook. This accounts for over one third of Facebook users and will result in over a billion people’s “facial recognition template” being deleted from Meta’s servers. This change in Facebook’s system has multiple consequences: Faces will not be recognized in Memories, photos, or videos. People will no longer be automatically tagged in photos, though manually tagging still works. The Automatic Alt Text (AAT) feature, which describes and identifies people in the photo for the visually impaired, will no longer include names in its descriptions. For users already opted in, the template used to identify them will be deleted. This change has been seen as a victory for privacy advocates despite its tradeoffs. The timeline for the shutdown is not exact, but Meta has stated they will be removing the system and deleting templates within “the coming weeks.”