Facebook announced today that they are going to be unveiling a couple of new security features for the site. One of the features is becoming increasingly common with websites where users login and it will prompt additional infromation from users if Facebook believes a person may not be legitimately logging onto the site.
Given that Mark Zuckerberg’s own fanpage was hacked yesterday, new security is always a good thing.
Let’s say that you live in Florida and logged in to Facebook from Florida this morning and that all of a sudden, someone from London trys to login to your Facebook. The site will prompt for additional information for you to verify that you’re you.
Sometimes sites will use those annoying text boxes where you have to type the letters you see.
That is called a captcha and it is meant more to verify that it is a human loging in, not so much that it is the legitimate owner of the account, as the Facebook blog notes.
Facebook has come up witha pretty clever way for you to verify yourself. They are going to show you a set of photos of a Facebook friend and make sure that you can recognize the person.
The advantage of this over a captcha is that any person can type in a captcha. It’s a matter of simply decyphering the letters. While anyone can figure out the captcha, people aren’t necessarily going to know your Facebook friends.
Certainly this is not full proof. What if a friend of yours is hacking into your Facebook and the does know the friends who Facebook is using to verify your identity? That is a legitimate question and I don’t think Facebook has a very good answer for it. Ultimately, I think that the resonse would essentially be, “Well it’s still better than what we’ve had up to this point.”
And that’s true. Another potential problem could be
Facebook then said that they have to protect your information so that they can have it all to themselves to shamelessly sell. (ok, they didn’t actually say that).
jrb
