Facebook wants to use facial recognition to help you regain access to your account

According to TechCrunch, Facebook is working on an account recovery method that will use facial recognition. Imagine your Facebook account has been hacked, you are trying to regain access to it and instead of you answering some security question or selecting pictures of your friends in order to get a security code via email that you’ll use to log back in, you can just use your face.

Well, that’s exactly what Facebook is trying to achieve with this new development. The feature will only be available on devices that you have previously used to log into Facebook and it will be optional to you if you have a device capable of facial recognition. Since it is optional, it won’t be a replacement for the already existing two-step authentication that’s currently being done via SMS but will be available alongside.

According to Facebook, if the feature proves to be secure and not easily fooled by pictures or other hacking methods then they will roll out the feature to more people. It seems like the feature will be most helpful in situations when you’re offline and can’t access your email or get any SMS, maybe you’re on an airplane or somewhere deep in the jungle on an adventure.

It will be able to work offline because the data about how your face looks like when you first set it up won’t be transmitted to any online server but will instead be stored locally on your phone. Now, when you try to get back into your Facebook account using this method, the facial recognition software will check the face it’s seeing against the data about your real face which is stored on your phone as we mentioned earlier.

So it’d be quite secure in terms of privacy since the data is only on your phone and not somewhere online.

It’s interesting how this development from Facebook comes a few weeks after Apple released their 10th-anniversary phone the iPhone X and Samsung released their Galaxy Note 8. Both devices support facial recognition so Facebook aims to use the hardware in those devices to their full potential.

However, in the past, Facebook has received some bad feedback concerning their facial recognition implementation which meant to automatically tag your friends in your photos. Hopefully their implementation this time will work better than it did. Since it will only be used to help you gain access to your account privately without sending the data anywhere else, then it might not receive as much negative feedback when it comes to privacy.

Now, such features both on Facebook and on these new flagship devices bring up the question are we ready to move on to facial recognition as a way of securing our devices and apps? Would you use facial recognition if most devices came with it? What fears do you have about facial recognition? Let us know what you think in the comments section down below.