UPDATED 12:15 EDT / OCTOBER 02 2017

EMERGING TECH

Facebook is working on its own face recognition tech to speed account recovery

Apple Inc. is not the only tech giant turning to facial recognition to streamline account security. Social media giant Facebook Inc. confirmed today that it is testing out its own Face ID-like program, which would be used to make it easier for users to recover locked accounts.

“We are testing a new feature for people who want to quickly and easily verify account ownership during the account recovery process,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “This optional feature is available only on devices you’ve already used to log in. It is another step, alongside two-factor authentication via SMS, that were taking to make sure account owners can confirm their identity.”

Face recognition tech has been around for a while, but it only recently become more reliable thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence. Although there’s no specific information about Facebook’s project, Apple’s recently announced Face ID shows how far the technology has come. For example, Apple said in September that its face recognition tech cannot be fooled by masks or photographs.

Facebook’s new face recognition feature is currently only in testing, so it might never find its way to the core Facebook app, but the test shows that Facebook is looking for new ways to use its extensive computer vision technology.

Facebook has a number of AI projects in the works, but image recognition is one of the cornerstones of the company’s research, and it is already in use in a few different ways on the social network. Facebook uses computer vision to recommend friends to be tagged in photos, and earlier this year, Facebook started using computer vision to fight revenge porn by automatically blocking images that have been previously removed from the platform.

Last year, Facebook open-sourced a some of its computer vision tools, allowing the AI community to use and improve on its image recognition technology. In February, Facebook also unveiled a project that would allow users to search pictures by what is in them rather than by labels or tags.

Photo: geralt/Pixabay

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