Nowadays social media plays a very important role in our life. Social media gives people a way to stay in touch with people who live far away. It let people share funny, interesting and informative content. It gives the business a way to engage with customers. It has changed the way people live their life today, social media has made communication process much easier.
There are so many social media websites, with over 100 million registered users, like Facebook, WeChat, Instagram, etc. Out of them, Zuckerberg’s Facebook is one of the most popular and biggest social media.
This is undoubtedly the largest social networking site in the world and one of the most widely used. And, Facebook was perhaps the first that surpassed the landmark of 1 billion user accounts. It is considered one of the Big four technology companies along with Apple, Google Amazon.
Facebook claimed to have more than 2.4 billion monthly active users as of December 2018. However, it faces a big problem with fake accounts. It caught 2.2 billion fake accounts in the last quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019.
Many critics questioned whether Facebook knows how many actual users it has. To avoid this Facebook is thinking of introducing a new feature through their next major update over the social networking application. Facebook is testing a feature that will require users to scan their faces to verify their identities on the platform under certain conditions.
This is how Facebook’s Facial Recognition-based Identity Verification looks like
It asks me to look at several directions within the circle
It explicitly states no one else will see the video selfie and will be deleted 30 days after the confirmation pic.twitter.com/296bGRDyYZ
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) November 5, 2019
According to the developer and researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who found the unreleased verification system, this process might restrain people from creating such ‘fake accounts’ and this process is like a more advanced version of the standard CAPTCHA test and it will also enhance the privacy and security system of this application.
As the developer and researcher Wong note, the new system will ask users to verify their identities by taking a video selfie while looking in different directions so that it can help them to confirm their identities and verify the facebook user.
We’ve seen such usage of a camera-based facial recognition system in the latest smartphones.
Facebook also mentions that the video selfies we submit to them, will not be visible to others, and also the video will be deleted 30 days after the confirmation of the latter one’s identity.
Now the most important thing to look out for is how many privacy-minded users will trust the company? How we can be sure that Facebook isn’t going to do anything else with our videos or selfies, etc. Another notable fact is Facebook also does not state that how long it will take to verify a user’s identity using this method, it’s still fuzzy that when the video, that will be submitted by us, will be deleted.
Thus, in a nutshell, we can state that though facebook may have been popular and still is but this new feature will test the organization’s morality base and might be an issue of trust from the part of the social media users.
