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Facebook "Trusted Contacts" Lets You Pester Friends To Recover Account Access
alphadogg writes "Facebook Thursday said it's making available globally a feature called 'Trusted Contacts' that lets users select three to five friends who can help users recover account access such as if they forget their password. Facebook said the idea is that once these friends are identified as 'trusted contacts' through the user's security settings, Facebook will provide each of them with a special code. 'Enter the codes from [at least 3 of] your trusted contacts, and you'll be able to access your account,' Facebook says. 'After you set your trusted contacts, we'll notify them so that they can be ready to help you if you ever need it.'"
That sounds like a really good idea; adding a human element to password recovery using already established trust relationships. Of course, slashdot wouldn't be slashdot if we didn't try and skew reader response by painting it as "pestering".
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
While I'd hope that people would trust their friends to not abuse a privileged position in order to gain access to one's account, it's probably a good idea to pick friends from different, non-overlapping social circles to make it difficult for them to know who other "trusted" people for one's account are.
Facebook [..] Lets You Pester Friends.
Wasn't that already its primary use?
I'm not trying to convince you to start using Facebook; I'm just saying that yes, some people on Slashdot use Facebook, and we have our reasons.
I'm sure there will be plenty of young people pranking each other by hijacking their friends' accounts (or former friends) with this.
Probably nobody does in that cave you're hiding in, but out here in the world? Yeah, there's a couple people still using it, give or take millions.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
remember your unique password^H^H^H^Hphrase so recovery is never needed. when you login 10 times a day, every day, how long does it take to remember: correct horse battery staple.
people already use friends to hijack accounts, this will be NO DIFFERENT.
It creates yet another layer of "friendship exclusivity" in the Facebook social world. You have "friends" already, but now you can have "OMG BFF!" people as well, and some will feel accepted or rejected based on whether they are one of your "chosen few."
This is, of course, the intent - to create more hype and drama, and even more important, yet another vehicle for narcissism to flourish.
But I do not have 3 friends you insensitive clods!
I don't know about him, but I'm very happy in my Cave.
1. Hack account
2. Add your own friends
3. Set as trusted friends...
4. Success?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Yes. There is a real world outside of your room. People socialize. It might be hard to recognize it from the center of the universe you are in but it happens.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Isn't this security measure a bit overkill for a stupid social network site??
What's next? All 3 to 5 friends will have to enter their codes simultaneously to recover the lost account?
s/Friends/Chums/
You were so close.
Having " friends" instead of having a system saves FB money. Just another scheme .. ok now
It's all about profit. Now that the ice is broken ,i ask : when will FB users catch on and ask for their share of the money their data makes ?
Yes YOUR data makes THEM money , you get nothing in return . The Service ? LOL it's the tool they use to get your data that earns them money , it's not a service for you it's their tool to rake in the dough . They make billions with YOUR data . Wake up and send a letter to FB asking your share of the earnings. What they sell is YOU after all. Why not ask for fair return ? You accept to give them data , they need to accept to pay YOU for it.
All services that say " access to the service " is their way of repaying you are simply exploiting you. They count the smokescreen protects them from you finding out that their " service " is the tool they use to gather data and sell you . Wakee wakee . Cat's out the bag. Ask for your share of the profits everytime they sell your data. Why would anyone accept their lives be scrutinised , analysed then sold for free ? If i put it that way it don't sound good does it ? But that's what each and everyone participating in " social networks " or where the " service " is the reward falls for.
Ask for your share of what's rightly your's.
This is supposed to be a security... enhancement?! How many people do you know on Facebook who would "recover" your password, change your profile picture to the photo they took of you in drag being touched up by a biker, change your status to Dead and start inviting people to your funeral? Because that's the vast majority of my friends - I'd trust them with my life but wouldn't dream of trusting them with £5. Or my beer. Or access to my Facebook accou - ohhhhhhh wait!
I'm curious if you wrote that with a big grin on your face or if you genuinely believe that Facebook is having issues with maintaining its dominance.
Interesting, so three of your "best friends" could work together to reset your password and gain access to your facebook account? In middle and high school enemies and friend change quickly. This could create some nice hijacking opportunities for malicious "friends".
Yes. There is a real world outside of your room. People socialize.
Yes, there is a real world out there. As opposed to Facebook, which you mostly access from your room.
Yes, people socialize. Have meals together, go dance, study together, play and sing, and much more. But it happens in "the real world outside of your room".
Sure, you can use Facebook to facilitate much of that, but you can do that with a phone or a car or e-mail too. Yet that doesn't make people think that the phone or car or mail server is the venue.
Assuming friends have overlapping friends and some of these overlapping friends are naturally trusted better than others, wouldn't once you get the ball rolling and get 3 passwords somehow, you be able to start getting passwords of a whole friends group soon?
Of course getting 3 passwords may be hard. And even then its hardly a guarantee that those 3 will have the keys you need to unlock other accounts.
And of course, you better make sure you can trust your trusted friends really well.
For some reason the banks and credit card companies are very friendly on phone. They seem to trust the caller id and an actual human being on the phone.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is how it works for QQ/Weibo/etc in china. It's very *very* handy, so stop being whiny little babies. If even 1/10th of what you moan on and on about is an actual concern for you, why are you even on facebook. Of all the shit things people do to track you... *this* is what you complain about.
This is a very useful (it saved me!) recovery scheme. I wish google had it. *That* account is valuable, not my facebook.
I don't get it... If I have already hacked the account why I need any of the other steps?
I thought about helping you get back into your account...then i remembered that weird tirade about gay marriage and kenyan socialism you went on last year...and that time you wouldnt shut the fuck up about kony....and the farmville crap. Trust me, this is for your own good.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Got my three trusted Facebook friends ready to give me my password, the NSA, FBI, CIA.
The three to five people you choose as 'Trusted Contacts' are likely to be the 'closest' to you and thus the most likely to share behaviour and preferences with you.
Once you identify those people, Facebook can use their patterns to (presumably) target ads at _you_ better, and charge a premium to advertisers for this 'more accurate' imprint.
Whether this works remains to be seen, but in any case this has nothing to do with convenience and much more to do with monetization.
Sound like a good idea in theory, and it would also allow close friends to close an account of a departed one.
I know previously this can be distressing to contact facebook admins, and convince them that this is a valid request.
Because it prevents the original owner from regaining control.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Yes. There is a real world outside of your room. People socialize.
Yes, there is a real world out there. As opposed to Facebook, which you mostly access from your room.
Yes, people socialize. Have meals together, go dance, study together, play and sing, and much more. But it happens in "the real world outside of your room".
Sure, you can use Facebook to facilitate much of that, but you can do that with a phone or a car or e-mail too. Yet that doesn't make people think that the phone or car or mail server is the venue.
You mostly access Facebook from your room? ("In Korea, only old people use email...") I access Facebook from my car, from the office, from the park, from a bar, waiting in line at the DMV, via text, etc...
It's a forum for electronic communication. Sure it's possible to primarily use it purely for random connections, but well over 90% of my Facebook friends I know (or have at least met) in person.
If you're asking "Why Facebook them when I could just text them*?", you're doing social media wrong.
*(outside of a disaster situation)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
so inactives that have passwords will mysteriously come under default ownership of friends of old defunct account thus activating dormant accounts....
It is about the account owner forgetting his/her password.
4. Get busted because now they know who you really are,
(it's trivial for Graph to figure this out based on the friends you choose)
5. Jailtime?
"Rubber duck says he's your friend Adam. Grant access? y/n" Rubber duck strikes again!
I've heard a lot of complaints about people passing away, and their facebook account becoming inaccessible to friends or family. This would be useful in the event of a long-term disabling event or death, allowing a spouse or close friend to pass on information in the event of a tragedy (or just begin the process of closing out the account).
Assuming they do in some fashion regain control of their account (and setting trusted friends doesn't prevent them from using some other password reset channel), they can simply un-trust your faux friends. Account security is restored. Granted there's a race condition if you can re-reset the password faster than they can un-trust you, but that seems like an *awful* lot of work to keep a Facebook account.
My friends ex boyfriend did this last month to find where she was. He had previously setup several fake fb accounts and added them as friends, used them to reset her password, then used her messages to find where she was staying. I called the cops when he showed up at midnight yelling from the front yard and breaking our vehicles. Scary
This enables distributed spear phishing. No more serial bottle necks.
Facebook = "out there in the world"?
Get a life.
4. Get busted because now they know who you really are,
(it's trivial for Graph to figure this out based on the friends you choose)
5. Jailtime?
Unless your selected "friends" are just sock puppet accounts.
Wonder where that idea came from...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
If you're hosting a party with >20 people, it's simply easier to make a Facebook event, invite people, and see who says they're attending/maybe/not attending than actually calling/texting one and one person in order to invite them and check if they can make it.
As someone who is not on facebook, I find that it must be highly annoying for people like you to invite me to places... you do your whole facebook thing, and then still have to manually get in touch with the people like me who don't have facebook (at least you know that I'm not on your friends list), and worse, those who do have it, but who have stopped checking it. (where you might assume they'll get the invite but they never respond..)
But for what its worth I don't really care if it annoys you. My social life is already pretty booked, and if I miss an event where you couldn't be bothered to invite me in person ... well how close of a friend are you likely to be anyway?
It's where most people upload their photos.
I'm rarely interested enough in someone else's life to log into facebook to see pictures of what they did, so I don't miss it.
Usually people show me their pictures when I see them in person anyway, which I find better since they tend to chat about the context of the picture (what happened, where it was, the adventures and mishaps... whatever) and I find that more interesting then the images.
It's an easy way to keep in touch with people I know, even though I don't know the email addresses or phone numbers of most of them.
Not having facebook means I do have the email addresses and phone numbers of people I want to keep in touch with.
most people check their Facebook account more frequently than their mail account, and many even have access to Facebook from their cell phone
maybe in your circle of friends. Not in mine. I know several have facebook on their phone, but just as many don't as they find the the crap-flow overwhelming, or its a work phone, or they just don't want facebook interupting them at work, etc. I've also got several friends that don't have accounts, or have created accounts but don't use them actively. So they can't reliably be reached. But they can all receive SMS. And most do have an email address on their phone... not to mention a phone number that I can just call them on.
It's a decent way to procrastinate.
Fair enough. But if you have internet access and still need help with that... lol. :p