Facebook Facepalm

I discovered today that Facebook has a new security feature in place that kicks in when you log in from an unknown computer. Cool enough, I say - my bank has the same feature in place, and given the rampant rise of identity theft and the abuse of other people's personal information in this ever-more-technological day and age, I think that it's a good step overall. The last thing I want, after all, is for someone with a tiny social circle and a large bank of spare time to send out funny kitty video viruses and Viagra ads through my Facebook profile.

Interesting side note: for some reason, my phone knows that the "V" in "Viagra" is supposed to be capitalized and corrected me when I failed to do so. I'm not entirely sure what that says about what Apple thinks of its user base given that they clearly thought to include that in the iOS autocorrection data bank. Perhaps they expect me to start talking to my reflection in building windows or to buy a classic muscle car.

In any case, Facebook did not seem to think things all the way through when they designed their system and their methods of accountholder identification. The first step is a bot-thwarting "Captcha," wherein you identify a pair of words in an image to ascertain your humanity, as opposed to a spam-machine. I'm not entirely sure how the technology works, but it generates random words into an image that a computer program supposedly cannot read, thereby preventing spammers from creating dummy accounts by the truckload and flooding our Walls with flotsam. If you're still not sure what they are, they usually look like this:


Sometimes they look like this:


And sometimes they look like this:


Googling "CAPTCHA fail" brings other amusing examples.

The second step in the re-Facebooking process is a multiple choice option of email/text verification, security questions, or a Facebook original: Identify Your Friends. This last option brings up a few friends' profile pictures and asks that you identify them out of six choices. Easy enough, right - if you're really you, you should know who [insert your name here]'s friends are. All would be fine and dandy were it not for a few annoying Facebook trends with which you, dear reader, may be familiar or even guilty of participation.

When I logged in via a work computer today, this is what I was presented with:


For the sake of reiteration, Facebook is asking me to identify which of my friends these are. Based on their profile pictures.

::Ahem::