Facebook conveniently announced a couple of security enhancements the day after an alleged hack of Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s page, which remains hidden since it got pulled yesterday. Today the company’s official blog says this Friday is Data Privacy Day, which may have been the originally planned date for announcing the new features that now seem like a shrewd response to a high-profile hacking.
The features Facebook is promoting include some that have already been available, but the newest addition to the mix is called social authentication. I actually stumbled onto this feature yesterday when I attempted to log on and the site informed me of what appeared to be an attempt to hack into my account. Instead of asking me to type in a series of letters displayed in a captcha, I was presented with other options for confirming my identity, and while the others weren’t even memorable, I was intrigued by the one Facebook calls social authentication: A quiz consisted asked me to identify the friend tagged in a series of photos, using a white border box around the same person in several different images all showing groups of people. The multiple-choice answers consisted of names from my friend list, and each question included three or four images with the individual in question. The whole exercise involved maybe four questions total.
After I completed the authentication exercise, Facebook informed me that someone tried to get into my account from an AOL address in rural Kansas while I was away from my desk, and asked me to change my password, which I did. Apparently the social authentication feature is in test mode and the social network wants user feedback. My humble opinion: It’s a very cool exercise that might get challenging for those whose friend lists include people they don’t know very well.
The other security features that Facebook is touting in today’s blog are remote logout and one-time passwords, which the company first announced in October, plus the also previously announced secured connection that delivers the entire site via https://www.facebook.com. This secured address is recommended for accessing the site via public networks and it delivers entirely encrypted pages that make for a slower experience of the site. Right now, this extra secure version of the social network is optional, and is being phased in over a ten week period. The feature will appear as an option within account settings but the social network hopes to eventually make that the default.
What do you think about these security enhancements?
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