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Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, is testing facial recognition technology on celebrity ads to filter out scams. The technology, initially tested on selected famous faces and gearing up for testing on around 50,000, identifies scam ads by comparing images in the ad with celebrities’ profile pictures. The move follows the rise in “celeb-bait” frauds, victimising celebrities like Elon Musk and Oprah, among others. As part of this, Meta will inform celebrities about the protective feature via in-app notifications. However, cautious handling is required due to Meta recently settling a $1.4 billion biometric data lawsuit.

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Meta, the parent company of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, is exploring the use of facial recognition technology to catch fake celebrity ads. These fraudulent ads are pretty annoying and popular on their platforms.

In the initial testing phase with a handful of celebs, Meta’s facial recognition seems to be making good progress. They’re now getting ready to test it with about 50,000 famous faces in the next few weeks.

Here’s how it works: The system takes the images found in an ad and compares them to the celebs’ profile pictures on Facebook and Instagram. If it is a match and the ad is a scam, then Meta nixes it right away.

Some well-known names like Tesla’s Elon Musk, Oprah, and mining billionaires from Australia, Andrew Forrest, and Gina Rinehart, have all been victims of these scam ads.

This tech update is part of Meta’s broader efforts to quash “celeb-bait” scams where cyber thieves get creative and trick users into sharing their personal info or cash.

As part of the rollout, Meta will send notifications to many celebs through the app, letting them know they’re covered by this protective feature (though they can choose to opt out if they want).

However, Meta’s got to tread carefully after recently settling a $1.4-billion lawsuit with Texas for illegally using people’s personal biometric data.

Any facial data produced when figuring out if a celeb ad is a scam will be trashed right away, says Meta. Plus, they plan to use this tech to help people verify their identities and get their accounts back if they’ve been hacked.

Despite the rise in these kinds of crypto scams on Facebook, Meta denied that almost 60% of these schemes on the platform were scams, as claimed by Australia’s consumer regulator. A lot of these scams lure people in with deepfake videos that are eerily realistic.

Source: Cointelegraph