Meta brings to Europe facial recognition to recover accounts and combat scams based on celebrities

Meta will use facial recognition technology in the European Union to combat fraudulent ads that use the image of celebrities and to facilitate the recovery of an account with a video to verify identity.

Fraudulent ads and scams that use the images of celebrities have proliferated in social networks. Its objective is to deceive users, who trust a person they recognize, such as an actor or a ‘youtuber’, to get them to provide sensitive personal information or money.

Meta platform policies do not admit this type of content or behaviors. To combat them, they will facilitate the public figures of the Europe and United Kingdom the possibility of receiving protection based on facial recognition.

It is an optional characteristic. If activated, the goal systems will use this technology to compare the face of a celebrity from the profile image in their official Facebook and Instagram accounts with which it is used in the fraudulent announcement.

In case of confirming a coincidence, and determining that the announcement is a scam, it will be blocked. From the company they have explained that it is a real -time process, which is faster and faster that the manual review that a person can do.

Recover the account with a videoselfi

Meta will also use facial recognition to expedite the recovery of a Facebook or Committed Instagram account. In this case, he explained that they can ask for a videoselphi to verify the identity of the person and confirm that it is the legitimate user.

This measure aims to help people in case their account has been ‘hacked’, but will also allow platforms to verify the identity of a person if the system suspects that someone has accessed an account without consent.

This system asks the user to load a video of himself, a videoselfi, which the system compares with other profile photographs with facial recognition technology. The process, according to the company, takes about a minute.

From the goal they ensure that this measure has privacy and security guarantees; They only use the Videoselfis once for identity verification, which as soon as it is loaded is encrypted and saved safely.

The video will never be published in the user’s profile and as soon as the identity verification is made, the company will eliminate the facial data generated, regardless of whether or not there is coincidence.

The videoselfi will be just one of the options that the company gives to users to recover its accounts. However, it defends that it is a more robust, precise and fast system, and more difficult to abuse by a malicious actor, because it requires that it be the legitimate owner of the account who does the recovery. And requires a real video, which is resistant to videos generated by artificial intelligence.

The option to recover the account with a videoselphi is available from this Wednesday for users of the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea.