Facebook allows you to use your face to recover a hacked account

In a notice to Vietnamese users, Meta said it is testing a method of verifying identity via self-recorded videos to help restore accounts.

Users can lose access to their Facebook or Instagram accounts due to forgetting their passwords, losing their devices, or being tricked into giving them to scammers. Previously, the platforms would require identity verification by submitting identification documents or certificates containing the account holder’s name. With the new method, Meta said it will let users upload videos of themselves, then compare them to profile photos the user has previously posted.

According to Meta, this method is similar to identity verification tools used to unlock phones or access applications that require eKYC today.

This method is claimed to be “a simple, quick option as the entire verification process takes just one minute”. In addition, the new method is said to be less vulnerable to exploitation than the traditional method of using documents.

However, this form also causes concern when previously, Facebook was fined 1.4 billion USD by a US court for collecting faces for the photo tag suggestion feature.

According to Meta, selfie video data is “encrypted and stored securely.” “Meta will delete the facial data immediately after the comparison is complete, regardless of whether the results are a match,” the platform asserts.

In Vietnam, many people have reported losing their accounts due to fraud, appropriation by hackers, or having fake accounts created, fake documents created, and then reported to have their real accounts taken down.

Meta says it “wants to protect users and their accounts, even if it doesn’t always work perfectly.” Fraudsters are constantly changing their tactics to evade detection methods and tools, requiring platforms to continually build and test new technical measures.

The company also noted the emergence of forms of using celebrity images to attract attention and then lure users to fraudulent sites, known as celeb-bait. According to Meta, this violates the platform's policies, but is difficult to detect because they are designed to look like legitimate ads, while Meta mainly uses automated technology to moderate ads.

To combat this, Mark Zuckerberg's company is testing a new way to detect fake ads. If an ad is suspected of featuring a public figure, the system will use facial recognition technology to compare the person in the ad to their Facebook and Instagram profile photos. If it detects an impersonation, the system will block the ad.