Meta brings back facial recognition with new security features for Facebook and Instagram

Meta is bringing back facial recognition technology to its apps more than three years after shutting down Facebook’s “face recognition” program amid a wider tech backlash. Now, the social network will start using facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to fight scams 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 scam ads that use the faces of celebrities and other public figures. “If our systems suspect that an ad is a scam containing a public image that is at risk of attracting famous people, we will try to use facial recognition technology to match the face in the ad with Facebook and Instagram profile pictures. ,” explained Meta in a blog post. “If we confirm the game and the ad is a scam, we will block it.”

The company said it has already begun rolling out the feature to a small group of celebrities and public figures and will automatically begin enrolling more people in the feature “in the coming weeks,” though people have the ability to opt out. Although Meta already has programs in place to review ads for potential fraud, the company is not always able to catch “celeb-bait” ads as many legitimate companies use celebrities and public figures to market their products, Monika Bickert, VP of content policy. in Meta, said in the forum. “This is a real-time process,” he 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 tackle another long-standing issue at Facebook and Instagram: account discovery. The company is testing a new “selfie video” option that allows users to upload a clip of themselves, which Meta will then match to their profile pictures, when users are locked out of their accounts. The company will also use it in cases where an account is suspected to be in trouble to prevent hackers from accessing accounts using stolen information.

The tool will not be able to help everyone who loses access to a Facebook or Instagram account. Many business pages, for example, do not include a person’s profile picture, so those users will need to use the existing Meta account detection options. But Bickert says the new process will make it more difficult for bad actors to game the company’s support tools.

With both new features, Meta says it will “immediately delete” the facial data used for comparison and that the scans will not be used for any other purpose. The company also makes features customizable, although celebrities will need to opt out of ad fraud protection rather than opt-in.

That could draw criticism from privacy advocates, especially given Meta’s sordid history with facial recognition. The company previously used the technology to enable automatic photo tagging, which allowed the company to automatically recognize users’ faces in photos and videos. The feature was discontinued in 2021, when Meta erased the facial data of more than 1 billion people, citing “growing public concern.” The company is also facing lawsuits, mainly from Texas and Illinois, 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.

It’s worth noting, then, that the new tools won’t be available in Illinois or Texas to begin with. It will also not be distributed to users in the United Kingdom or the European Union as the company “continues to have discussions there with regulators” in the region, according to Bickert. But the company “hopes to scale this technology globally sometime in 2025,” according to a Meta spokesperson.