Facebook announces security features

NAMING YOUR FRIENDS and HTTPS are Facebook's latest attempts to convince us that it is serious about security and not simply a massive database exercise for marketers.

As if your Facebook page doesn't hold enough information about you, the social notworking website is suggesting that you tell it who your friends are in the photos that get posted to your page. You see this is key to one of two new security features outlined by Alex Rice in a Facebook blog post and is no doubt nothing to do with any analysis of your own social networks for marketing purposes.

The new security feature where your friends' names are needed is for a login situation when Facebook has detected what it thinks is suspicious behaviour. By suspicious Rice means access to a user's account by computers that are located in different parts of the world within a short timeframe. Short enough that you could not possibly have travelled that distance, one imagines. Anyway, to be allowed to log back in to your account Facebook will want you to confirm that you know who your friends are by showing you the pics and you naming them.

The other security feature is the deployment of HTTPS across Facebook as a whole. But Rice tells us this is only an option that will arrive soonish. And Facebook wants you to know that if you opt for the added security feature, pages will download slower. Rice also wants you to know that "many third party applications are not currently supported by HTTPS".

Heaven knows those third party applications might transmit data about your activities to fourth party marketers, so don't be too hasty in signing up for HTTPS.

But don't worry if you don't. Once HTTPS is rolled out for the entire website in the months to come, Facebook will still only offer it as an option, mentioned in the smallest of small print.

Despite the fact that neither of these security options are apparently starting today or this week, Rice mentions that this coming Friday is Data Privacy Day.

What is that? It is "an international effort by governments, businesses and avocacy groups to raise awareness about the importance of staying in control of personal information". Oh how they must have laughed at that at Facebook Towers when Rice's text was approved for the blog. µ