Meta is bringing facial recognition technology back to its apps, more than three years after Facebook shut down its “face recognition” system. Now, the social network will begin using facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to fight 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 scam ads that use the faces of celebrities and other public figures. “If our systems suspect an ad may be a scam that contains an image of a public figure who is at risk of celeb-bait, we will use facial recognition technology to try to compare the faces in the ad to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures,” Meta explained in a blog post. “If we confirm the match and find the ad is a scam, we will block it.”
The company said it has already rolled out the feature to a small group of celebrities and public figures and that it will begin automatically enrolling more people in the feature “in the coming weeks,” though individuals have the option to opt out of the protections.
While Meta already has systems in place to review ads for potential scams, the company isn’t always able to catch “celeb-bait” ads because many legitimate companies use celebrities and public figures to market their products, Monika Bickert, vice president of content policy at Meta, said in a briefing. “It’s a real-time process,” she said of the new facial recognition feature. “It’s faster and it’s more accurate than manual review.”
In addition, Meta is also testing facial recognition tools to solve another long-running problem on Facebook and Instagram: account recovery. The company is experimenting with a new “video selfie” option that allows users to upload a clip of themselves, which Meta will then match to their profile photo when users are locked out of their accounts. The company will also use it in cases of suspected account hacking, to prevent hackers from accessing accounts using stolen credentials.
The tool won’t be able to help everyone who loses access to a Facebook or Instagram account. For example, many business pages don’t include a person’s profile photo, so those users will need to use Meta’s existing account recovery options. But Bickert says the new process will make it much harder for bad guys to use the company’s support tools. “It will be much more difficult for them to try to bypass our system,” Bickert said.
Meta says that with both new features, it will “immediately delete” the facial data used for comparison and the scans won’t be used for any other purpose. The company is also making these features optional, although celebrities will have to opt-out of the scam ad protections rather than opt-in.
This could draw criticism from privacy advocates, especially given Meta’s messy history with facial recognition. The company previously used this technology to power automated photo-tagging, allowing the company to automatically identify users’ faces in photos and videos.
The feature was discontinued in 2021, when Meta deleted facial data from more than 1 billion people, citing “growing social concerns.” The company is also facing lawsuits, most notably from Texas and Illinois, over its use of this technology. Meta paid $650 million to settle a lawsuit related to the Illinois law and $1.4 billion to resolve a similar lawsuit in Texas.
It’s notable that the new tools won’t initially be available in Illinois or Texas. According to Bickert, it also won’t be available to users in the United Kingdom or the European Union as the company “continues to have conversations with regulators in the region”. But according to a Meta spokesperson the company is “hoping to roll out this technology globally sometime in 2025”.