Facial recognition is about to take a more active part in personal security apart from just being used to unlock smartphones. Facebook will be implementing this method of security for verification, based on a recent report.
While there is no clarity on what Facebook will use it for, but the company has stated that facial recognition will used to protect users from third parties. A few people have already come across a prompt from Facebook, which asks to upload an image of the user where their face is clearly shown. Facebook does promise to delete the photo from its servers once the user’s identity has been confirmed. To elaborate, a spokesperson from Facebook had stated that the security feature will help in finding out suspicious activity happening throughout the site, which include taking actions such as creating an account, sending Friend Requests, setting up payments for ads as well as creating or editing ads as well.
The feature would only activate if Facebook detects any suspicious activity haven taken place with a user’s account. It is not yet clear as to what facial scanning method Facebook will use or how secure it is aimed at being. What we do know is that Facebook has been testing this feature on users as far back as April of 2017. Currently, there are various methods, both automatic and manual, which are being implemented to identify the users.
According to 9 to 5 Mac, the feature may be triggered by logging from an unfamiliar device or location. There is also another system that Facebook is using that is currently in trial, where it is allowing users to upload their nude photos privately so that the site can create a digital fingerprint of the photo and prevent the same photo to be uploaded by anyone else. During an age where hacks and revenge photos are common-place nowadays, the feature may find favour among its users. Whether everyone will be open to the idea, is still questionable.
The new photo-identification feature has been rolled out to the masses just yet, but should soon see the light of day in the coming months, and will be used for extraordinary cases and not just for simple logging-in methods. Hopefully, other social networking sites will also adopt the feature and implement the technology more prominently in smartphones, just as they had previously done with fingerprint sensors.
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