Meta is bringing back facial recognition technology to its app, more than three years after it was shut down amid widespread backlash against Facebook’s “facial recognition” system. Going forward, the social network will begin rolling out facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to combat fraud and help users who have lost access to their accounts, the company said in an update.
The first test will use facial recognition to detect fraudulent ads using the faces of celebrities and other public figures. “If our system suspects that an ad may be a scam, including images of famous people at risk of celebrity baiting, we use facial recognition technology to identify faces in the ad. We try to compare it to the celebrity’s Facebook and Instagram profile photos,”’ Mehta explained in a blog post. “If we see a match and the ad is confirmed to be a scam, we’ll block it.”
The company said it has already started rolling out the feature to a small number of celebrities and public figures and will begin automatically enrolling more people in the feature “in the coming weeks,” but individuals can You can opt out. protection. Meta already has a system in place to screen advertisements for potential fraud, but many legitimate companies use celebrities and public figures to market their products, so the company is constantly You can’t always catch a “celebrity bait” ad, said Monica Bickert, vice president of content policy. In the meta, he said in the briefing. “This is a real-time process,” she said of the new facial recognition feature. “It’s faster and more accurate than manual review.”
Separately, Meta is also testing facial recognition tools to address another long-standing problem with Facebook and Instagram: account recovery. The company is experimenting with a new “selfie video” option that will allow users to upload clips of themselves if they’re locked out of their account. Meta matches the clip to your profile photo. The company also plans to use this in cases of suspected account compromise to prevent hackers from accessing accounts using stolen credentials.
This tool cannot help everyone who loses access to their Facebook or Instagram account. For example, many business pages don’t include personal profile pictures, so those users must use Meta’s existing account recovery options. But Bickert said the new process will make it much more difficult for bad actors to exploit the company’s support tools, adding: “They’re trying to bypass our systems at a much higher level. It’s going to be difficult.”
With both new features, Meta says it will “immediately delete” any facial data used in the comparison and the scans will not be used for any other purpose. The company plans to make the feature optional, but celebrities will have to opt out of fraudulent advertising protections.
This could draw criticism from privacy advocates, especially given Meta’s troubling history with facial recognition. The company previously used this technology to power automatic photo tagging, allowing it to automatically recognize users’ faces in photos and videos. The feature was discontinued in 2021, with Meta removing the facial data of more than 1 billion people, citing “growing social concerns.” The company also faces lawsuits from Texas and Illinois, among others, over its use of the technology. Meta paid $650 million to settle a lawsuit related to the Illinois law and $1.4 billion to settle a similar lawsuit in Texas.
Therefore, it is worth noting that the new tool will not initially be available in either Illinois or Texas. Bickert said the service will not be rolled out to users in the UK or European Union as the company “continues to consult with regulators” in the region. However, a Meta spokesperson said the company “wants to scale this technology globally in 2025.”
