Meta announced that after Facebook shut down its “facial recognition” system three years ago, it would reintroduce this technology for anti-fraud and account recovery purposes on Facebook and Instagram. The company stated that these new tools will increase user security.
Meta’s initial testing phase will use facial recognition technology to detect fraudulent ads using the faces of celebrities and other public figures. “When our systems think an ad contains the face of a celebrity and may be fraudulent, we will use facial recognition technology to compare the face in the ad to the celebrity’s profile photos on Facebook and Instagram,” Meta said in a blog post. “If we detect a match and fraud, we will block this ad.”
The company announced that it has already rolled out this feature to a small group of celebrities and public figures and will automatically start including more people in this protection in the coming weeks. However, users will have the option to disable this protection. Monika Bickert, Meta’s vice president of content policy, noted that “celeb-bait” scams that misuse celebrity advertising are difficult to spot because many legitimate companies also use celebrities to promote their products. He emphasized that the new facial recognition feature will accelerate this process and provide more accurate results.
Meta is also testing facial recognition tools for account recovery, another long-standing issue on Facebook and Instagram. The company is working on a “video selfie” option to regain users’ access to their locked accounts. This feature involves users uploading a short video of themselves and having it paired with their profile photo. At the same time, this tool will be used in cases of suspicious account takeovers and will prevent access to accounts with stolen credentials.
It is also stated that this tool may not solve everyone’s account access problems. For example, many business pages do not have a contact profile photo, so these users will have to continue using Meta’s existing account recovery options. However, Bickert stated that this new process will make it more difficult for malicious people to abuse Meta’s support tools.
Regarding both new features, Meta emphasizes that facial data will only be used for comparison purposes and will be deleted immediately after the process is completed. Additionally, the company stated that these features are optional and explained that celebrities should disable this feature to protect themselves from fraudulent ads, otherwise they will be automatically protected.
Meta’s return to facial recognition technology is notable, especially considering the legal issues and privacy concerns the company has had with this technology in the past. The company turned off the automatic photo tagging feature in 2021 and deleted the facial data of more than 1 billion users. As a result of lawsuits filed in states such as Illinois and Texas, Meta had to pay $650 million in compensation in accordance with Illinois law and $1.4 billion in another lawsuit in Texas.
Meta will not bring its new features to Europe
It was stated that these new features will not be available in Illinois and Texas initially. Additionally, this technology is not expected to be available in the UK and the European Union. Meta official stated that negotiations with regulators in these regions are continuing and the technology is planned to be used on a global scale in 2025.