Facebook Uses Facial Recognition in Europe to Tackle Fake Celebrity Ads

Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, will use facial recognition to detect fake ads featuring celebrity images. The new application is launching in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and South Korea.

It should also give users the option to recover their accounts.

Fake ads featuring doctored celebrity images are widespread on social networking sites. Pictures of public figures are often misused to entice people to share personal information or transfer money. “We believe this tool will help us identify misused images of public figures,” said David Agranovich, director of cyberthreats at Meta.

According to Meta, the application has already been tested in several countries. Now the technology is being expanded to “a larger number of personalities”. In the coming weeks, several celebrities will be notified that they are eligible for the new functionality.

Anyone who activates this new Meta option agrees to their profile photos being used for facial recognition. This makes it possible to compare faces that appear in potentially fraudulent ads. If fraud is indeed involved, Meta technology will automatically block the ad.

“We believe this tool will help us identify misuse of images of public figures, even if the images were created using generative AI,” Agranovich says.

Meta also wants to use facial recognition for non-public figures, who want to do so themselves. This should make it possible to verify identity when an account has been blocked. Meta says it will not use this data “for any other purpose than this one-time comparison”. The technology is being applied under the European GDPR rules for the protection of personal data, the company adds.