Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta is gradually releasing its facial recognition technology across the platforms to help people who are locked out of their accounts recover them.
The technology also aims to help spot scam ads that use celebrities’ images to defraud unsuspecting users.
Tech experts say the move is a major expansion of Meta’s facial recognition system, which was rolled back in 2021.
Already, the company’s Vice President of Content and Privacy, Monika Bickert, said it has started using face technology to help Instagram and Facebook users reclaim their accounts that are being locked out.
“The company has also been running a test of the technology to spot so-called “celebrity bait ads,” which often rely on AI-generated images of famous people to entice users into buying into whatever scam they’re promoting.
As of now, only a “small group of celebrities” are enrolled in the program, Bickert said.
How it works: To recover their accounts, users will be able to upload a video recording of their face.
Meta’s facial recognition system will then compare that video to the profile pictures on the account the user is trying to access.
Facial recognition isn’t the only option. Users can still choose to upload photos of their ID cards or other official documents.
The intrigue: Meta is not deploying the technology in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and a few other jurisdictions due to local data collection laws, Bickert said.
Flashback: In 2021, Meta shut down its decade-old facial recognition system and deleted the face data of more than one billion users.
Back then, the technology was used to automatically identify people in photos and suggest “tags.”
But at the time, the company said it still saw facial recognition as a powerful tool to verify identities and prevent fraud.
The big picture: Cybercriminals have become scarily good at hijacking people’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in recent years.
Typically, scammers will gain access to these accounts to help steal someone’s identity, share posts about their scams, or extort a user into paying a ransom demand.
Between the lines: Meta has faced several lawsuits over its use of facial recognition in recent years.
In July, the company agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle a 2022 lawsuit with the state of Texas over the collection of users’ biometric data.
The company worked with policymakers, regulators and privacy and security experts worldwide before beginning the most recent tests, Bickert said.
What’s next: Meta plans to roll out facial recognition for account recovery to all users over the next few months, depending on how initial testing goes.
The company is expanding its celebrity bait ad tests in December to another group of celebrities, and in the meantime, Meta has started reaching out to other famous people to enroll them in the program.
NB: Contains content sourced from www.axios.com,
