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Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

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Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#81

Post by flexd »

algorias wrote: post #2

With each passing day, I look less and less like a lunatic for avoiding facebook (and its ilk) like the plague. You should try it.

I have been thinking about it, but around here Facebook is so common it would be weird not to have it.

My friends never send SMS any more, they use Facebook messenger. Nobody asks you for your phone number, they ask to add you on Facebook. Nobody invites anyone to anything without creating a Facebook event.

If I suddenly leave Facebook I am certain I'll also lose out on a lot of social life.

What do you use for instant messages? Do you just use email a lot more?

I really wish some kind of distributed social network could take off the way Facebook has. I do not want anyone to keep my data as much as the next guy, but if you want to be a social person in 2013 (at least here), you kind of need to have a Facebook account.

A guy I met at the start of the semester is a german exchange student. He had to create a Facebook account when he got here because pretty much everything happens on Facebook. Some things do not even have their own website, just a Facebook page.

Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#82

Post by kalleboo »

dlss wrote: post #40
DominikR wrote: post #32

I am going to get a lot of downvotes for this but I am still curious to hear what solutions the HN community could come up with for the problem Facebook is facing: Some of the accounts have been hacked. You locked the accounts as a security measure. Now you need to validate that some person is the actual owner of the account. How would you solve this problem? (Sending a code via text message to the owners mobile devi…

I'll take a stab at this. Before I get in to it, we need to correct a misconception on your part: using a government ID doesn't work in every case. It turns out hackers know how to forge government ID images, and some of FB's users don't have government IDs (for instance, before I turned 16 all I had was a private school id). With that out of the way, I think they should do what you suggested: sms verification. Email…

> As does having a user's friends vouch for them (they call their friends and ask).

This is probably the most "Facebook" of the options. They already do something similar for some account lockout situations ("identify 5 photos of your friends to gain access").

Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#83

Post by DominikR »

Soarez wrote: post #49
DominikR wrote: post #32

I am going to get a lot of downvotes for this but I am still curious to hear what solutions the HN community could come up with for the problem Facebook is facing: Some of the accounts have been hacked. You locked the accounts as a security measure. Now you need to validate that some person is the actual owner of the account. How would you solve this problem? (Sending a code via text message to the owners mobile devi…

Facebook already has a good mechanism for validating account owners which involves showing users random unlabeled photos of their friends and asking them to guess who's who. I guess an excuse like "you got hacked" helps you get much more important information from your users. No one is talking about how all of the sudden, a lot of accounts supposedly got "hacked".

How on earth could this "solution" to trick its users possibly scale to more than 1 billion active accounts?

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe that Facebook would like to link government IDs to each and every account if they could, but trying something like this would be the end of Facebook.

They can't be that stupid.

Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#84

Post by kalleboo »

ncarroll wrote: post #54
DominikR wrote: post #32

I am going to get a lot of downvotes for this but I am still curious to hear what solutions the HN community could come up with for the problem Facebook is facing: Some of the accounts have been hacked. You locked the accounts as a security measure. Now you need to validate that some person is the actual owner of the account. How would you solve this problem? (Sending a code via text message to the owners mobile devi…

FB has great face recognition software and multiple tagged photos of pretty much everyone who has an FB account. Show 20 photos (or 42 or however many you need to get the chances of a lucky guess small enough) and let me - click on me. Give me 2 chances and if I'm wrong both times give a link for a quick video chat with a FB rep for ID purposes.

They already have an "identify 5 photos of my friends" system for some account lockout situations. But that may not be sufficient if the hacker has already had access to the account for a while (they'll have had time to scrape the user's friends list).

Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#86

Post by DominikR »

crististm wrote: post #63
DominikR wrote: post #32

I am going to get a lot of downvotes for this but I am still curious to hear what solutions the HN community could come up with for the problem Facebook is facing: Some of the accounts have been hacked. You locked the accounts as a security measure. Now you need to validate that some person is the actual owner of the account. How would you solve this problem? (Sending a code via text message to the owners mobile devi…

Facebook's problems are their own. Why should HN community bother with their problems? - What's wrong with secret questions?

> Facebook's problems are their own.

Of course.

> Why should HN community bother with their problems?

No one has to, I just like to learn something by solving problems, even when those problems are not mine.

> - What's wrong with secret questions?

Probably nothing, I just know that I have always entered garbage into secret question fields, because I knew that I'd never be able to remember the correct answer to the secret question once I needed it.

Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#87

Post by sneak »

algorias wrote: post #2

With each passing day, I look less and less like a lunatic for avoiding facebook (and its ilk) like the plague. You should try it.

I tried it for over five years. Many people use facebook messaging as their primary form of text communication these days.

Texting is expensive and regional, and nobody uses email, wants to remember email addresses or IM handles, or deal with spam. WhatsApp totally fucked themselves by not running on tablets.

For lots of people, the most effective way to reach them quickly is facebook messaging. That's fact, not opinion, and how intrusive or shitty facebook is totally irrelevant to that point.

Not having a facebook account means that you are sabotaging your own communications effectiveness.

Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#88

Post by DominikR »

adhipg wrote: post #41
DominikR wrote: post #32

I am going to get a lot of downvotes for this but I am still curious to hear what solutions the HN community could come up with for the problem Facebook is facing: Some of the accounts have been hacked. You locked the accounts as a security measure. Now you need to validate that some person is the actual owner of the account. How would you solve this problem? (Sending a code via text message to the owners mobile devi…

Some options: * A video call with a Facebook agent who verifies you. * Uploading a picture of yourself holding a card that says 'Facebook', their city and the current date or similar. The city is something that FB can verify with IP address and account profile. Yes, these aren't 'web scale' methods but I surely hope that they aren't just using OCR to validate Government IDs.

I believe the picture solution could be entirely automated.

The text on the card could be read by OCR technology and Facebook already is capably of matching your face to your account.

Edit: After thinking some more about it I came to the conclusion that it would be too easy to fake such an image. Anyone with internet access and MS Paint could probably create a fake within 3 minutes.

Also - I'm not sure that it would be a good user experience.

Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#89

Post by sneak »

One of my least favorite memes in western society is that individual people actually believe that the government has some say in defining your name or the boundaries of your family.

Everything from the idea of "legally changed his name" to "same-sex marriage" illustrates the problems of turning to city hall for approval or consent of individuals' and families' deeply personal and private matters.

I wish the US had two more constitutional amendments: our bodies are property belonging to us individually and we are free to do with them as we please (solves abortion debate, war on drugs, assisted suicide, et c) and that government has no authority to regulate private familial matters such as what terms we use to call ourselves, what terms we use to call our loved ones, or who is within or without our families and the terms we use to refer to them (solves the current state of marriage inequality for homosexual relationships and also the discrimination against families that practice nonmonogamy, as well as any other oppressive status-quo reinforcement these assholes may come up with in the future).

It takes a very special kind of oppressor to tell you what words you are allowed to use to call yourself, what things you are allowed to do to your own body, and who you are allowed to love and allow into your family.

Re: Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”

#90

Post by Amadou »

How does Facebook intend to validate these government IDs?

I'm pretty sure they can't. They want you to send a scan of some photo-id - that means that all the anti-tamper / anti-forgery tech that might be on the actual ID will be non-existent.

If you are lying about who you are, it will take about 10 minutes in photoshop to come up with something that will pass their test.

Are there any countries that even provide validation services that facebook could use? As I recall, South Korea used to require residents to provide their national ID numbers to access most (all?) in-country websites. That ended up producing a ton of identity theft so they repealed that law.

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