Habitually Good

Everyone is always making fun of Facebook about privacy and how it doesn’t do enough to protect the users. Well, it was in this context that I saw this box on my Facebook side bar today:

Well, I thought – nice, so Facebook is letting people with poor privacy settings in place know that they can actually do something about it (another problem with Facebook has always been that even though users can do better with their accounts settings – and protect their privacy better, sometimes they just don’t know about it).

So I clicked it wondering that what privacy options have I left open – and how nice of Facebook to let me know. Anyway, what I saw was not what I expected. It was a screen for the protection of my account (damn, that is what it said on the section, why wasn’t I reading; why did I think it was to do with privacy). Anyway, it was about the security of my account (you know, alternate email addresses, etc.). The reason I was getting this alert was that I didn’t have a security question configured for my account. You know those “what’s your pets name” questions.

Well, here’s what Facebook presented me with:

These are the only 4 options for questions “that only I can answer” as per Facebook. I don’t know about the others, but for three of them I will have to ask my mom. I don’t remember the last name of my first grade teacher (not sure my mom would, but she might). I have no clue where my mom was born – do people normally know this? And I have no idea about the street name where we were living when I was 8 years old. Seriously, if I have to ask my mom for the answers to these questions, then where’s the security.

And the last one – the 5 characters of my driver’s license – that assumes that I have a driver’s license (well I do, but not everyone does).

How difficult is it to have me define my own question to which only I know the answer.

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