Yes, I make most of my living working with Facebook. But, sometimes I just wish one of the little cyborgs would materialize in front of me so that I could smack it in the back of the head and say, ‘Seriously, WTF were you thinking?”
It used to be that to access your account from a new location you would need your access information and full birthday. That’s it. I originally thought that was stupid because there are so many people that display their full birthday on their profile and that it just wasn’t a security feature at all. So, then Facebook turned up the security half-a-notch and made it so that the user was notified when their account was accessed from a new location. Ok, I can see the point in that. Not exactly very secure, but ok.
Well, the cyborgs came up with a whole new security solution! Check it out! This is just pure genius in the making!
Facebook now has a new security feature where if you access your account from a new location you have to answer a few simple questions about your ‘friends’. Specifically, you have to identify 7 of them (you can miss two) from images that they (or anyone else Facebook-wide) has tagged of them. Seems like a pretty good idea right?
Yeah, if you have 50 friends that you actually know, that each has maybe 50 friends that they actually know. And ALL of those friends ONLY tagged pictures of them with their actual face in them, not their childhood pics, not their dog, not their kids or what-have-you. Come on Facebook, really? They allow 5,000 connections and THIS is a security feature?
Seriously now, why wasn’t I invited to the 4:20 meeting where the Facebook security expert team sat up and said, “Hey, if they want to access their account from a new location just make them identify 5 images of 5,000 random friends to get back into their account!” BRILLIANT!
So basically, if you take a vacation and try to access your Facebook from a computer that you have never used before, then you are going to be in friend-hell until you can identify 5 of 7 random pics. Oh, and did I mention that if you get it wrong the first time you have to wait an hour to try again? And don’t think accessing it from your computer at home is going to unlock your account, because your account is LOCKED buddy! You are not getting in until you identify 7 random people period! Enjoy your vacation!
I am no security expert, but I have to say that there are other ways of securing accounts. Even Senators are complaining that Facebook APIs leak all kinds of personal information about you and your friends, but if you want access to your account from a remote computer…. Well THAT’s secure now… even from you!
