Probably because they have better replacement for it.

Here is some additional information, and confirmation, about what I wrote one week ago about Facebook shutting down its facial recognition system.

While this announcement IS good news, surely several experts have been quick to point out a couple of gotchas that are definitely of public interest. First, this was not a court order, just an internal decisin that Facebook may cancel whenever they want. It’s laws that protect people, not for-profit companies. Second, in the long run that spontaneous shutdown of face recognition may really NOT matter, for these and other reasons:

1. Meta’s declared focus on Virtual Reality and the metaverse means it will collect much more personal information than ever before. They will just have to. “By necessity, virtual reality hardware collects fundamentally different data about its users than social media platforms do."
2. In other words, face recognition may have a different, possibly much more limited role than today for Facebook and Meta. But in any case, it will be only one of many invasive collection methods that will still target all kinds of your own personal, biological data

All this will make it technically possible for Meta to “create identification and surveillance systems that are at least as powerful as the system it’s putting out to pasture”, making Facebook’s current services to Big Pharma look like children play.

For many more details on, for example, all the patents Facebook/Meta have already filed to collect biological data, read the full article.