A new kind of Facebook captcha: upload a photo where you can see your face

Facebook began to experience advanced CAPTCHA. To test whether a robot or a person is trying to perform a certain action in the system, the social network asks to send your photo. Today, one of the users told on Twitter that the Facebook mobile application had turned to him with such a request. Other users have confirmed that they also encountered such a message.

The screen reads: “Please upload your photo, which clearly shows the face. We will check it and then permanently remove it from our servers. ” Next is a button to select a file, as if it were a desktop computer, not a mobile phone. From the phone it would be more logical to offer to make a self-portrait.

It looks pretty weird. What versions can be?

In the comments to his tweet, the user says that he did not provoke such actions of the system. That is, the offer to upload a photo appeared without any apparent reason. The user has a single Facebook account.
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The comments also discussed the words of one of the developers who work on Facebook. He admitted that the company has no environment for testing new features. Absolutely all of them are tested on real users. In fact, why waste your energy on some special testing system, if you have a huge army of real users at your fingertips: just indicate the sample size - and test anything.

True, in this case, it would be logical to assume that the test function will first be tested on those suspected of owning multiple accounts. But it is believed that such a check can be initiated for you if someone complains that you have a fake account. Then Facebook will be checking.

Paranoids may express the opinion that the function is checked for those who do not have a person in their profile photo, but some abstract drawing is worth it and maybe there are not enough photos in the photo album. The idea is that Facebook wants to have a biometric database with the faces of absolutely all users in the world, so now it fills in the gaps.

In any case, they also report on numerous cases when Facebook required the user to provide documents proving his identity (according to the rules, the user is obliged to indicate his real name in the system). It happened that the social network blocked the account even after the person provided all the necessary documents .

Very plausible is the version that Facebook is testing a new biometric authentication system - face recognition. Of course, they already have numerous photos of the faces of almost all users. Accordingly, for authentication in the system, they may ask you to make a self-portrait - and the AI ​​system will reconcile with profile photos and a photo album. At least, if Apple is allowed to do this on the Face ID system, then why not Facebook? However, in the case of Face ID, biometrics data for face recognition (mathematical representations of faces) do not leave the device and are not transferred to the cloud, and in the case of Facebook, the company only promises to remove them from its servers. So this is a completely different situation.

In a comment for Wired , a Facebook representative gave the following wording: the photo test “helps us catch suspicious activity at various interaction points on the site, including creating an account, sending friend requests, setting up advertising payments, and creating or editing ads.” A company representative assured that the process is fully automated, including the registration of suspicious activity and verification of the user's photo. Facebook only checks that the photo is unique .

Facebook does not say when it began to use such a technique, but on the Reddit forum one of the users reported on it in April . Tellingly, he actually sent a photo with his face, as expected, but the photo never passed the test (picture is invalid). Probably not very nice to receive such an answer.

By the way, Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has been checking users for some time now. For example, asks to send a photo where you hold in your hands a piece of paper on which the code specified by them is written :



Checking these photos, too, in principle, can be carried out automatically.