Leading up to Data Privacy Day this Friday, someone hacked into the Facebook fan page of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company reportedly attributed the breach to a software bug and said Wednesday that it had been repaired, but in the meantime it was busy rolling out a new security initiative that will let potential hackers see photos of your "friends." 

Instead of requiring you to type distorted words that a computer has a hard time recognizing (a technique called "captcha") to authenticate yourself, Facebook is trying out a new kind of "social authentication" which requires you to identify pictures of your friends from a list of possible names. "Hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don't know who your friends are," wrote Facebook's Alex Rice in a post on the company blog Wednesday. 

It's hard to know where to begin examining the irony here. The L.A. Times' David Sarno gets a good start:

"[F]or a company that has repeatedly said it is renewing its commitment to user privacy, isn't it a bit odd that Facebook is using personal information--photos and names--to quiz the very people whom you would least want to have that information?" Sarno asks. "Do people want their photos shown to 'hackers halfway across the world'--with a multiple-choice list of names so short that it would be fairly easy to pair a name with the face, either by guessing or by Googling?"

Facebook also launched a new HTTPS browsing feature this week, which enables users to activate a secure browser for their pages. This is a nice feature, writes ZDNet's Sam Diaz, but it would be nicer if it were a default setting. When features that benefit the company are added as default settings, features that protect users' data shouldn't require manual setting, he maintains.

"Here's my question: What is it going to take for Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook team to finally get the message that we want our privacy respected?" Diaz asks. "If I wanted my web experience to be more personalized, give me the option of opting-in to those features. Don't just include me in some money-making scheme that only further compromises my privacy. It's deceptive. It's shady and it's just flat out wrong."

For more:
- see this CNET article
- see Alex Rice's post at Facebook blog
- see David Sarno's post at the L.A. Times
- see Sam Diaz' post at ZDNet

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