Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company, Meta, is bringing back its facial recognition software on Facebook to tackle the rising cases of celebrity scams also known as “celeb bait” scams, where scammers use images of public figures in fake ads to deceive users.
The software shut down three years ago is being revived due to privacy concerns and regulatory pressure.
According to the company, the trial of the software, which will start in December, will automatically compare the Facebook profile photos of about 50,000 public figures with images used in suspected scam advertisements.
If Meta detects a match and identifies the ad as a scam, it will block it. Celebrities involved in the trial will be notified of their enrollment and can opt-out if they choose.
Meta said it plans to roll out the trial globally but will exclude some major regions such as Britain, the European Union, South Korea, and U.S. states like Texas and Illinois, where Meta lacks regulatory clearance to use facial recognition technology.
Meta’s Vice President of Content Policy, Monika Bickert, explained that the trial aims to protect public figures whose images have been frequently used in scam advertisements.
“The idea here is to roll out as much protection as we can for them. They can opt out if they want to, but we want to make this protection easy and available,” Bickert said during a briefing with journalists.
To address privacy concerns, Meta said that any facial data generated during the trial would be immediately deleted after being compared with images in suspected scam ads, regardless of whether a scam was detected.
Meta’s reintroduction of facial recognition comes after the company shut down its facial recognition system in 2021 and deleted the face scan data of one billion users.
These scams often use images of famous people, sometimes generated by artificial intelligence, to trick users into investing in fraudulent schemes.