Don't give Meta your face

Recently, you may have been asked by Instagram to give a video selfie (Meta, Meta). It may sound harmless, but before you press record you should really think about why they want it. Meta has seemingly stopped doing standard forms of verification like multi-factor authentication, instead opting to require their users to give them a copy of their face. This paired with their inconsistent and frustrating implementation of security leads to more and more users willingly giving them not just a photo of their face (which you likely do on your profiles anyway) but an entire 360 view for them to use. This is not unrelated to their AI generation endeavours, digital ID verification laws, and their facial ID on their Meta Ray-ban camera glasses.

Why do they want our faces

I believe that it is not coincidence that the only way to restore your account is by giving a face scan. They say they give you a choice to do it or not, but unless you're willing to give up your account there's really not one (Meta). They may not give you any other option to get your account back - they didn't for me (Meta). According to their policies, they compare a numerical value representing your face generated from your selfie to photos on your account to prove if you are "real" or not, even if (like in my case) there are no photos of you on any of your accounts. Also according to their policies, they are deleted afterwards (Meta). Given the amount of scandals big tech involves itself in and how much they're encouraged to prioritize profit over doing good, I can't believe that.

Meta has been working on forced facial recognition for their Meta Ray-bans for a while now (Mehrotra). They waited to launch this facial recognition in their camera glasses until the political environment was in a place where the "civil society groups that [they] would expect to attack [them] would have their resources focused on other concerns" (Hill et al.). Facial recognition requires them to get access to faces for them to identify and faces to train their models off of.

Don't forget that AI (specifically image and video, in this case) generation requires data (like scans of your face and other images) in order to improve outputs. Meta's been rolling out more and more image generation features, including generating photos of real, non-consenting people and shoving the generation into DMs (Cress, Bradbury, Meta). They'll allow advertisers to directly generate images (Meta).

It's also worth mentioning that this all coincides with the recent uptick in digital ID verification laws and policies from the world's great countries and companies as of late. Those rely on facial scans and photos of IDs in order to lock minors and adults alike out of the internet while storing that data on often unprotected servers where the data could be exposed. Even if they aren't using their account verification facial scans as age verification scans, they could still be using the data to train their age-determining models.

I don't think its unfair to draw a comparison between their forced face scans to get your accounts back and their facial/age recognition or AI generation.

Personal Experiences

I've had trouble with Meta operated accounts long before I had social media. They bought the VR company Oculus (founded by a guy who also founded a military drone contractor), so now all the sudden I needed a Facebook account to play my family's video game console (because that totally makes sense). The problem was that you still couldn't make a Facebook account if you were underage, meaning I had to make fake accounts with gibberish names where I lied about my age in order to play kids games on the $300 console we bought (Lang). In 2022 they decided that you didn't need a Facebook account to play video games anymore, you just needed a Meta account instead (Wong). That's so much better: instead of one Meta-owned account that you need to be 13 for in order to play kids games, I just need a different Meta-owned account that you need to be 10 for in order to play kids games (Meta)! Problem solved! Yes, I'm still mad about this from when it happened to me as a kid.

My two Instagram accounts - my personal one and my account for this project, @machines_against_the_rage - have each been suspended more times than I can count. I can at least understand why they'd want to suspend @machines_against_the_rage - as I directly teach people how to avoid ads and get off social media - but that doesn't make it right. I believe that none of that is against the community guidelines, and they don't cite any specific policies other than account security when locking my accounts (Meta, Meta). @machines_against_the_rage gets locked at random intervals, and only gets locked when I am actively using the app at that moment. In order to unlock it, I have to download Meta's own Whatsapp (as the verification never works with standard texting) and then wait days on end (even though it says it should take an hour).

This most recent time they locked my account was what really annoyed me. I submitted the appeal after downloading Whatsapp as I normally do, but it took longer than it normally did to get my account back. I used the AI support bot, as you can't talk to a real person until you do, which suggested that, actually, everything was fine and that all I needed to do was reload my browser and my account should be back. That didn't work; my account was still locked. That escalated it to a real person, who said unless I gave them a 360 degree scan of my face I would never get my account back. They said they needed it to "verify ownership of [my] account", which doesn't even make sense. I'm not sure how a scan of my face while I hold a 2FA code on a sticky note proves I own an account that doesn't even have any photos of me on it. Does it not just prove I know how to use a camera and a pen, or an AI video generator?

For the now previously explained reasons I refused to do that (in addition to general privacy, I don't even have any pictures of myself on my personal Instagram), and so I sadly assumed I would never get my account back. They said that there was absolutely no other way, even when I mentioned the obvious privacy reasons that I would not be doing it. When I asked if I could verify via email, verify via mutuals, or talk to someone else, they ended the conversation without the option for me to respond. Then the next day at 4 AM they reinstated my account after days of it being disabled, so I don't even know what all that fuss was about.

As for my personal account, I think they just hate me. They specifically lock my acount whenever I simply edit my bio. Every single time; without fail. It's a private account with less than 100 followers, I don't see a reason for that to happen so consistently. To get it back, I have to change my password and hope for the best while I wait. To be fair, I do use a modified version of the Instagram app that blocks ads and adds features, which I'm sure qualifies as being against the terms of use, but they don't cite that when blocking me and that doesn't answer why it gets blocked when I edit my bio.

I'm not going to pretend that I know more about cybersecurity than a multi-billion dollar corporation does, but this is just silly. There has to be a better, less suspicious way to go about all this. There's no way that this is the best a billion dollar, genocide enabling company can do. That leads me to the idea that this is bad by design: they disable my public account so the message doesn't spread (or they just decide to pick on me), then they force me to download Meta-owned Whatsapp and give them a face scan for them to use in order to get it back. They create my problem (which solves one of their problems), and the only way for me to fix it is to give them what they want.

Conclusion

I've spent more time than most on trying to escape social media while still being connected to the online world, for the purposes of this site. You can see my findings on the Social Media and Streaming page - it includes both general strategies to get off the platforms and software you can use to block ads and increase privacy. I'd say that I've been successful. I don't rely on it as a form of entertainment anymore. I only use my public account to share this project, and I only use my personal one to connect with people I know in real life or creators and organizations who aren't on other platforms. I'm at the point where, if it wasn't for DMs, I'd have deleted my personal account long ago. The day they lock one or both of my accounts is the day I leave Meta completely and never look back. I really need to tackle the to-do list item of making accounts on more platforms for this campaign. In summary, just don't give Meta your face.