Facebook checks for impersonating accounts within friend circle
San Francisco, May 6: Facebook has admitted that it mostly looks for impostors -- who use a user's photo as their profile pictures -- only among friends and friends of friends, a media report said.
According to The Washington Post, Facebook said that it does compare profile photos against millions of other users', but it did not reveal a specific number.
"We use new technologies to protect people on Facebook and we are often able to improve as we roll them out," Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld said.
"In the early days of this feature, we are focused on alerting people to new and recent photos posted by their friends and friends of their friends. We hope to improve how we use this technology over time."
It also did not disclose how it chooses which accounts to compare against and sometimes it disables people's real accounts instead.
The social media giant recently launched "Face Recognition" feature that said that switching it on can "help protect you from strangers using a photo of you as their profile picture".
The company believes that there were as many as 87 million fake accounts as of last quarter, which is nearly five times as many as the 18 million fakes on the website back in 2016.
Facebook said the increase was due to "episodic spikes" in fake account creation in countries such as Indonesia, Turkey and Vietnam.
Although Facebook has done a lot of work in face recognition and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools as its weapons to combat political propaganda, hate speech and misinformation, the company was struggling to use the technology to connect real people around the world.
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Gurugram: Student sends school bomb threat e-mail to shift classes to online mode
Gurugram, Dec 21: A 12-year-old student of a private school allegedly sent a bomb threat e-mail to the institution in an attempt to shift to online classes, police said on Saturday.
An FIR was registered at the Cyber Crime (South) police station and the student was identified, they said.
According to a Gurugram police spokesperson, on December 18, a complaint was received from the authorized person of Shriram Millennium school, sector 65 regarding the school receiving a bomb threat on their email.
Investigations traced the e-mail to be of a 12-year-old boy, Station House Officer Naveen Kumar said.
During interrogation the boy revealed that he is a student of the same school and he had sent the e-mail with the intention of prompting the school to switch to online classes, the SHO said.
"He said that he had mistakenly sent the mail without understanding the gravity of his actions. The student is cooperating with the investigation and a probe is underway", the spokesperson said.
