Meta brings back face scanning to combat scams and account hacking

By Jess Weatherbed , a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Facebook and Instagram are testing new facial recognition tools that could help users quickly restore compromised accounts and combat fake celebrity-endorsed scams. Meta announced its plan to roll out experimental features that can scan a user’s face to verify their identity by comparing it against profile pictures on Facebook and Instagram.

The first usage of these tools aim to protect both celebrities and everyday people from so-called “celeb-bait” ads that impersonate notable figures to trick users into visiting scam websites. Meta currently uses automated technology like machine learning to detect content that violates its policies but says celeb-bait can be difficult to distinguish from legitimate ads.

“If our systems suspect that an ad may be a scam that contains the image of a public figure at risk for celeb-bait, we will try to use facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures,” Meta said in its announcement. “If we confirm a match and determine the ad is a scam, we’ll block it.”

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