Facebook’s been taking hits for any number of things lately, but here’s a smart move that clearly puts them ahead of the game when it comes to account security. Recently Facebook launched a “Trusted Contacts” feature that allows you to choose three to five friends that will each get emailed a unique code in the event you get locked out of your account. Once you get the codes that Facebook emailed each of your Trusted Contacts, you enter them on Facebook to unlock your account to regain access.
It’s a well conceived system in that you’ll have to acquire all of the codes that Facebook sends out in order to unlock the account. Thus, your girlfriend, father, college roommate, neighbor and therapist would all have to conspire to hack into your account with the five codes – seems a rather unlikely scenario, so consider this a safe system.
If you’re interested in setting up your own trusted contacts, here’s how to do it.
Each of your Trusted Contacts will receive an email alerting them that you’ve selected them as your Trusted Contacts. Now in the event you unfortunately get locked out of your account, due to either password error on your end, or due to some outside hackers or other variables, you can have Facebook send out the codes to your Trusted Contacts. Gather them up, enter them and you’re back in business.
Given the frequency of hacks these days into some of the Internet’s largest websites, it’s well worth setting up your trusted contacts soon. With any luck you’ll never need to actually use this feature, but it’s good to know it’s there in the event you do.
