Three years after Meta shut down facial recognition software on Facebook amid a groundswell of privacy and regulator pushback, the social media giant said on Tuesday it is testing the service again as part of a crackdown on “celeb bait” scams.
The celebrities will be notified of their enrollment and can opt out if they do not want to participate, the company said.
The company plans to roll out the trial globally from December, excluding some large jurisdictions where it does not have regulatory clearance such as Britain, the European Union, South Korea and the U.S. states of Texas and Illinois, it added.
“The idea here is: roll out as much protection as we can for them. They can opt out of it if they want to, but we want to be able to make this protection available to them and easy for them,” Bickert said.
In August this year, the company was ordered to pay Texas $1.4-billion to settle a state lawsuit accusing it of collecting biometric data illegally. At the same time, Meta faces lawsuits accusing it of failing to do enough to stop celeb bait scams, which use images of famous people, often generated by artificial intelligence, to trick users into giving money to non-existent investment schemes.
Meta said it also plans to test using facial recognition data to let non-celebrity users of Facebook and another one of its platforms, Instagram, regain access to accounts that have been compromised by a hacker or locked due to forgetting a password.
