Facebook has just rolled out its brand new Trusted Friends feature, which will allow you to recover your account with a little help from your friends, should you find yourself inadvertently locked out. As when some folk leave their house keys with neighbors when they go on holiday and or in case of emergency, this feature will give between three and five friends access to your account should you ever forget your log in.
Of course, this isn’t the kind of feature you’ll want to be frivolous with. In fact, taking the above analogy into consideration, if you wouldn’t trust a person with the keys to your house, you’re probably not going to want them potentially having access to your Facebook profile, either.
Still, if you have a couple of close friends reliable enough for this purpose, it could one day help you recover your account from the jaws of death. Many users either haven’t set up a security question, or may well have forgotten the question / answer that would help them re-access their account, and Facebook argues this Trusted Friends solution works better because, well, you’re unlikely to forget who your close friends are.
So, how exactly does the process work? Well, when you’re locked out of your account, Facebook will send different codes to your ensemble of trusted buddies. Apparently, each and every trusted contact will be required to take part in recovering the account, with each also facing a stringent login security system which closely monitors attempts to access accounts. In short, it allows users to choose friends (or a group of friends, if they so choose) they can actually trust – or rely on – and who will take good care of the account once it has been recovered.
If you’ve a close group of friends and would like to make a contingency plan for the occasion when you lock yourself out of Facebook, then this is something to consider. Facebook also encourages anybody looking to assign Trusted Friends to discuss in person or over the phone with the elected few to avoid impersonators or scammers infiltrating their account.
What do you think – would you trust your friends with your Facebook account? Please leave your thoughts on this new feature via the usual mediums below!
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