Facebook is reportedly testing a facial recognition system on its mobile app to verify whether users are humans or bots, researcher Jane Manchun Wong said on Twitter. She noted that the facial recognition feature "recognises my [her] face as a face," and doesn't associate it with an identity. The interface is similar to Apple Face ID's where users have to rotate their faces to give a more complete view of their faces while setting up the system. A message on the interface said that no one else will be able to see the video selfies and these will be deleted 30 days after it confirms that a human is accessing a particular account. However, Wong asked, "if Facebook doesn't store/remember the face 30 days after the identity verification, does that mean people can create new fake accounts and pass the video selfie test once a month?" It is also unclear why Facebook would store a user’s video selfie for a month after confirmation. Wong told MediaNama that she discovered this prototype interface while "reverse engineering the [Facebook] app". She also said that she wasn't sure if Facebook would store this data locally on a device (like Apple does) or on a server. She wasn't sure about it because she "didn't and didn't want to submit my [her] facial data". While this feature looks similar to Apple's Face ID, it is different from it because "this is designed for testing whether a user is a real human, while Face ID is used for…
