How I Almost Failed a Facebook Turing Test

I understand the reasons why people accept friend requests from people they might not know but personally, I will never friend someone I don't know. I might only have 30 friends but I actually know each one of them.

Facebook is just a social networking tool. If you decide to treat it careless and accept requests for people you don't know, expect its usefulness to dramatically decline. Use it what it's for... socialising with friends and perhaps you'll find you don't hate it so much.<p>As someone who has moved around a lot, I find facebook absolutely invaluable to keep in contact with old friends. I'm considerably closer to my old friends because of facebook, whereas usually I would have spoke to them a few times but eventually faded in contact with them.

A part of me feels like logging into Facebook to see what my friends are up to (ignoring the ones I'm not true friends with), feels more like a social obligation to not be a reclusive jerk than it is to keep up.<p>I talk to my friends in person, and do things with them on the weekend. I really feel like Facebook is more for teenagers and college students who need a constant stream of distraction. I can't count how many times I've been angered at parents who tolerate their kids playing DS or wearing headphones at the table when out to dinner. THAT is the Facebook generation.

I quit Facebook back in May when their Turing test wasn't all that well thought out. My friends often posted pictures of cartoons and other drawings and tagged them with names. Facebook asked me to identify those. Something like this (<a href="http://www.michellehenry.fr/Emotions3.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.michellehenry.fr/Emotions3.jpg</a>) for instance. Pissed me off so much I deleted my account after taking 4 tries to unlock it.

One of my less technically inclined friends received a similar treatment one day. Unfortunately for him, all the pictures that showed up were New Year, Christmas, Diwali (a Hindu Festival) greeting cards with his friends tagged. It's been two months and he still hasn't been able to sign in.

I think that Facebook is doing some interesting things on the security front, but it doesn't seem to be working very well. Every week another friend of mine gets his or her account hacked and I often get free iPad spam or whatever. As far as I can see, Facebook hasn't made any progress on this issue.<p>Even worse, they don't seem to provide good resources that describe how to fix a hack after it happens. Also, I've heard that there's no simple way to mass delete the spam that spews from your account. You can't even find it unless you look at every one of your friends' walls to see if you spammed them.<p>Shouldn't these hacks be pretty easy to stop?

Are there alternate ways of passing this test for people with disabilities? For example, I have some form of face blindness and wouldn't be able to pass this test, unless I could remember the pictured event itself.

It seems that Facebook aren't being very smart about which images they select. It shouldn't be too hard for them to choose only pictures which contain something recognisable as a face...

Maybe this would be more appropriate if the user was forced to set his own examples, though it'd be difficult to enforce a high level of 'challenge' to this test, if such a thing can be measured. The other problem with is that if you friends set their profiles to public, they help defeat your security.

That post is hilarious! And so very true....<p>First time I had to do that was overseas. I failed twice.... I then realized all my "friends" take pictures only at night and in groups of 10 or more!

Couldn't I just run the images through a service like tineye and get the peoples names that way? Seems like a weak test.

The Facebook "turing test" is also a scary way of bayesian improving facial recognition software so that they can track you and your activities better.<p>(here come the downvotes)

Maybe I haven't kept up, but if an account holder has their friends list publicly visible, can't you just open up another browser and refresh their profile until the relevant friend appears in the friends list?<p>Limiting factors:<p>A large number of friends would make this take a while.<p>Friends using non-self pictures as their profile pictures would prevent identification, unless the prompt contained their profile picture rather than a picture they are tagged in (or does the verification process only use profile pictures?).<p>Some third point I'm not thinking of.<p>Anyway, identifying pictures, when the target's friends list is publicly visible, seems kind of weak, on the surface.<p>EDIT: Probably to my eventual demise, but I've become exhausted and stopped keeping up with all the changing FB details. So, maybe I'm clueless on this point.