Meta will employ face recognition technology to avoid celebrity scams

Meta said in a blog post that it will employ face recognition to detect fraudulent adverts including celebrity photographs, known as "celeb-bait." The emergence of AI-generated pictures has enabled many scammers to entice ordinary people into clicking on adverts that lead to fraudulent websites, where they may be solicited to submit personal information or money. Meta is piloting the new method with 50,000 public figures and celebrities. It will compare the photographs on their current Facebook profiles to suspected scam advertising and block them if they match.

Scammers frequently establish a sense of familiarity by mimicking celebrities in private chats, sponsored posts, and advertisements. Existing celebrity photos can be modified using AI, and scammers can even mimic voices, making it more difficult for potential victims to detect fraud. These frauds have cost many people their life savings and huge amounts of money. One woman lost $300,000 after getting a Facebook message from a scammer impersonating a Brazilian singer.

Meta claims that early testing with a small set of celebrities yielded encouraging results in terms of speeding up the detection of these scams. In the coming weeks, the business intends to begin delivering in-app notifications to more famous individuals who are affected by such celebrity bait to inform them that they have been enlisted in the program. Celebrities and public figures can also choose to completely opt out of this protection through Meta's Account Centre.

Meta has a complicated history of storing data about people's faces. Due to privacy concerns and legal issues, the firm discontinued its facial recognition system, which was used to automatically tag persons in images, in 2021.

Meta also allows users to restore access to compromised accounts through the facial recognition feature. The company stated that it is trying video selfies with users to authenticate their identity and restore access to their accounts. After a user uploads a video selfie, Meta compares it to their profile image to determine whether it is authentic or not. According to Meta, this video selfie will be encrypted and saved, and any face data generated as a result of this comparison, whether or not it matches, will be deleted immediately.