Facebook built a creepy facial recognition system to identify people

After speaking to several sources working at Facebook, the folks at Business Insider learned about the company's facial recognition app, developed between 2015 and 2016.

The program, which has now been discontinued, was tested internally by its employees. Apparently, it was capable enough to identify anyone who had an account on the social network if enough data was available about them.

The app in question worked like a normal camera app but instead of taking a photo, it scanned a face in real-time and pulled that person's name and profile photo.

While the company described the tech as "an example of future innovations" it had planned, it was more like a short demonstration of its real-world mass surveillance capabilities.

After the BI report, Facebook admitted to developing the facial recognition app but said the program was never released publicly and couldn't recognize any/every member of the social network.

Instead, it said the app's access was given to employees and they were only allowed to use it for identifying colleagues and existing Facebook friends who had facial-recognition settings enabled in their account.

Facebook already employs facial recognition to identify faces in photos and help with tagging friends.

However, the development of this now-discontinued app shows how easily the company could create a way to identify over 2 billion users (active on its service) by their faces.

This can certainly scare a lot of people who want to keep their biometric data safe.