Meta is bringing back facial recognition with new safety features for Facebook and Instagram

Meta is bringing facial recognition tech back to its apps more than three years after it shut down Facebook’s “face recognition” system amid a broader backlash against the technology. Now, the social network will begin to deploy facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to fight scams 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 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 against the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures,” Meta explained in a blog post. “If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we’ll block it.”

The company said that it’s already begun to roll the feature out to a small group of celebs and public figures and that it will begin automatically enrolling more people into the feature “in the coming weeks,” though individuals have the ability to opt out of the protection. While Meta already has systems in place to review ads for potential scams, the company isn’t always able to catch “celeb-bait” ads as many legitimate companies use celebrities and public figures to market their products, Monika Bickert, VP of content policy at Meta, said in a briefing. “This is a real time process,” she said of the new facial recognition feature. “It's faster and it's more accurate than manual review.”

Separately, Meta is also testing facial recognition tools to address another long-running issue 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 photos, when users have been locked out of their accounts. The company will also use it in cases of a suspected account compromise 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. Many business pages, for example, don’t include a profile photo of a person, so those users would need to use Meta’s existing account recovery options. But Bickert says the new process will make it much more difficult for bad actors to game the company’s support tools “It will be a much higher level of difficulty for them in trying to bypass our systems,” Bickert said.

With both new features, Meta says it will “immediately delete” facial data that’s used for comparisons and that the scans won’t be used for another purpose. The company is also making the features optional, though celebrities will need to opt-out of the scam ad protection rather than opt-ion.

That could draw criticism from privacy advocates, particularly given Meta’s messy history with facial recognition. The company previously used the technology to power automatic photo-tagging, which allowed the company to automatically recognize the faces of users in photos and videos. The feature was discontinued in 2021, with Meta deleting the facial data of more than 1 billion people, citing “growing societal concerns.” The company also faces lawsuits, notably from the Texas and Illinois, over its use of the tech. Meta paid $650 million to settle a lawsuit related to the Illinois law and $1.4 billion to resolve a similar suit in Texas.

It’s notable, then, that the new tools won’t be available in either Illinois or Texas to start. It also won’t roll out to users in the United Kingdom or European Union as the company is “continuing to have conversations there with regulators” in the region, according to Bickert. But the company is “hoping to scale this technology globally sometime in 2025,” according to a Meta spokesperson.