Announced in an official Facebook post this morning, the social network plans to test a method of account recovery that uses trusted friends to provide access to a user’s Facebook account. This system is similar to lending out a house key to a neighbor or friend when traveling on vacation or a business trip. Friends can help a Facebook user recover account access when the user forgets their password and doesn’t have access to an email account for recovery. Facebook users can choose between three to five friends to trust with account recovery and they will be supplied a code via email to help regain access to the account.
Trusted Friends isn’t going to be a mandatory feature for Facebook users, but rather an optional tool similar to answering security questions. Facebook is also providing a new method of accessing applications through an extra layer of security. While the vast majority of apps only require a user to be logged into Facebook to work, app passwords can be used when logging into a third party application such as Spotify or Skype. To enable this feature on a particular application, the user goes to Account Settings, clicks on the Security Tab link and selects the third party application in the App Passwords section of the page.
Facebook management also touted security efforts from the social network to keep spam out of Facebook feeds. Less than four percent of content shared on Facebook is spam compared to nearly 90 percent of all sent email. Less than half a percent of all Facebook users experience spam each day and only 0.06 percent of the one billion logins per day are compromised. With over 750 million Facebook users across the world, fifty percent of that group logs into Facebook on a daily basis.
