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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Online fraud: Hotel chef from Udupi cheated of over Rs 1 lakh by WhatsApp contact
Udupi: Udupi City Police have registered a case of online fraud after a 62-year-old hotel chef was allegedly cheated of Rs 1.13 lakh by a woman who befriended him on WhatsApp, claiming to be based in London.
The victim, identified as Pandu Kariappa Poojary, a resident of Kuthpadi in Udupi, was working at a hotel in Mangaluru.
He reportedly came into contact with a woman identifying herself as Emilda William on WhatsApp. During their interactions, she told Poojary that she planned to start a cosmetics and hotel business in India and would meet him during a visit to Mangaluru.
On April 7, Emilda sent Poojary a flight ticket from London to Delhi via WhatsApp. The following day, Poojary received a phone call from a woman who informed him that Emilda had arrived at Delhi airport carrying a demand draft worth Rs 5 crore along with other items. The caller allegedly asked him to pay Rs 70,000.
Subsequently, Poojary also received a call from Emilda, who was reportedly crying and spoke about the situation. Believing the claims, he transferred a total of Rs 1,13,300 in phases using a scanner. He later realised that he had been cheated.
