Facebook FAIL

[roserodent]

Facebook is repeatedly in hot water for its access failings, but this one takes the biscuit. Now I am not sure if it's still there as my "Guaranteed a response to every email" form that I sent to the access team did not receive a response... either that or they have a backlog of over 18 months.

If you want to download an offline copy of your Facebook profile, or you lock yourself out of your account and you don't have certain preset security features already connected (they don't say which! I assume activating a cellphone number helps) then the verification procedure for proving you are you involves looking at a series of photographs and entering a multiple choice answer along the lines of "In this photo is one of your friends, is it John Doe, Peter Peters or AN Other?". Sadly, the photograph is of a train. Because all photos added to the profile photo album and all photos that have been tagged are assumed to be of the person named in the tag, they will show you any photos tagged to them and ask you to identify the person. Sometimes it's a group shot and it asks which ONE of your friends is that group shot a picture of. Woe betide you if you answer the wrong one, even if all 3 of the named people are in that shot.

Even without this ridiculous inclusion of pictures of trains, Christmas trees, etc. we have the issue of people with visual impairments, people with prosopagnosia and people who plain don't care what folk look like. I couldn't identify the vast majority of my friends in a line-up, even if I've recently had dinner with them! I suspect my (totally blind) father would do a better job, he's always been an ace at the picture round of University Challenge.

Comments

[pne]

I don't even know what half my online friends look like.

Facebook seems to live in a world where you're only friends with people you meet face-to-face on a regular basis.

[laceblade]

Not to mention every parent who uploads pictures of their baby as their profile picture. I'M SORRY BUT MOST BABIES LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME.


Uggghhh to this fail, :[

[kyrielle]

Also, there's a current meme of "post a picture of you at least a decade old as your profile picture" running around now. Most of my friends, even the ones I know in real life, I don't recognize in their current (old, sometimes grainy, and invariably kid-age) pics.

Ugh.

[freyakitten]

Or if all of the parents and grandparents have photos of the same child... I haven't seen that turn up with more than two people having different photos of the same child, but in an infinite universe, it's bound to happen somewhere...

[erratic]

I get that "feature" often because it also shows up if you log in from a different country/a friends foreign computer.

The best part is that if you don't have any other back up options they tell you that your only way to get your account back is to log in from a computer where you'd signed in before. So forget about using facebook at all until you get back home from your holiday (if you're lucky and your computer didn't hopelessly crash, as mine did).

[codeman38]

I've gotten these challenges when I log in from my own laptop on a different ISP. Granted, it might just be because of my security settings, which are set to auto-delete cookies... but really, their own advice doesn't guarantee being able to log in!

(Thankfully, I at least had the option available to confirm via e-mail. Which is good, because I am hopeless at recognizing people in random pictures.)

[elialshadowpine]

Oh fucking hell, this. I had this happen last year when I visited friends and was connecting from a different IP address, even though I had entered my password correctly and everything. It was a fucking NIGHTMARE. Between some amount of face blindness and friends who frequently change their profile pictures to things not themselves -- ARRRRRRGH.