Facebook will use facial recognition to find and eliminate bots

Bots are a huge issue for any social network. Not only do they infiltrate genuine groups, they also affect sales and advertising revenue. Facebook has got an intriguing new feature that will spot and eliminate fake profiles and it involves, of all things, taking a selfie.

App researcher Jane Manchun Wong has spotted the feature and tweeted about it.

"This is how Facebook's Facial Recognition-based Identity Verification looks like...It asks me to look at several directions within the circle...It explicitly states no one else will see the video selfie and will be deleted 30 days after the confirmation," she stated in her Tweet.

The only purpose of facial recognition is profile verification and not saving data for other purposes which is a genuine fear with Facebook. This is one of a series of steps to eliminate bots from the social network.

Facebook explicitly states that the selfie and a small video of a user's various profiles is aimed at confirming identities and checking if the user is a real person or not.

The company hasn't publicly stated anything about the feature, so it may be currently only in testing stage and the final product may be different. There is no date of rollout for this feature yet.

Facebook needs to be secure for people to feel free to post personal data on its social network. Data security is a big issue – the social network posted on its website on Tuesday that around 100 developers had improperly accessed user data. The company has now cut off these developers from all of its data.

The company, however, did not disclose the details of these developers.

"As part of our ongoing review, we recently found that some apps retained access to group member information, like names and profile pictures in connection with group activity, from the Groups API, for longer than we intended. We have since removed their access. Today we are also reaching out to roughly 100 partners who may have accessed this," Facebook Partnerships head Konstantinos Papamiltiadis stated in an official email.