I wanted to buy something second-hand. Unfortunately, Facebook Marketplace is the shit where I live. So I thought I could quickly register, contact the seller, and delete my account afterwards.
However, I refuse to participate in this insanity. Video selfie my ass, Facebook.
Can’t really be a bit of both because they can’t confirm shit if they don’t know what you look like in the first place. It could be to confirm that you are human (and maybe that you don’t already have an account) but they can’t confirm your “identity”.
Sadly they totally can. There are plenty of face databases already that they could use if they wanted[1], but if you have friends on Facebook (or Instagram) you might be in their pictures and Facebook run it’s facial recognition on every picture. Whether they can connect that to an identity or not isn’t something I know, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Tangentially related, I remember over ten years ago getting notified that I could tag myself in friends uploaded pictures that I was in, which was also when I started to get really creeped out by Facebook.
I remember this podcast about some https://www.searchengine.show/should-this-creepy-search-engine-exist/ but there is a decent amount of reporting about them ↩︎