How I Almost Failed a Facebook Turing Test | Hacker News Reader

How I Almost Failed a Facebook Turing Test

georgesaines.com

69 pointsgsaines22 comments

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.

That is a far more admirable method of Facebooking. I think I gave up being strict about accepting friend request shortly after registering and just tried to avoid social confrontation over declined friend requests. And this is apparently what it leads to. :)

Facebook has lists and fine-grained privacy controls, use them. I've got a list for 'friends' and 'acquaintances'. The acquaintances list only gets to see the wall posts and photos that I approve as acquaintance-friendly.

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.

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.

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.

My girlfriend has been trying out some new year's resolutions the past month and has actually "scheduled" facebook time so that she can better connect with her friends who use it all the time. She also writes letters to friends, calls friends on the phone, reads about linguistics (a passion of hers) and volunteers at the animal shelter once a week. After a month of strict adherence to the routine, she still finds her weekly 15 minutes of Facebook the most difficult obligation to uphold!

I'm small-talk challenged. I feel uncomfortable calling up friends unless I have something specific to discuss; uncomfortable getting together with them on the weekend just to hang out. Facebook bridges the gap that leaves, and lets me keep up with their lives without having to constantly make extraordinary social efforts.

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 (http://www.michellehenry.fr/Emotions3.jpg) 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.

Facebook should really use face recognition to make sure that there is actually a face on the photo.

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.

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.

Shouldn't these hacks be pretty easy to stop?

Yeah, I was a little nonplussed when I tried to do something about an acquaintance falling victim to the iPad worm that just struck recently. I didn't really know how to get ahold of her, and the only things Facebook offered were 'report' and 'mark as spam.' So I marked it as spam, assuming that Facebook would sort it out.

But it would be nice if Facebook offered an explicit "I think this account has been compromised." button.

Whilst I agree with my sibling that a button (beyond the generic 'report' link) for this would be good; most cases of hacking are either PEBKAC or a user being very careless with individual password security rather than a fundamental issue with Facebook itself.

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.

Interesting you mention that - a friend of mine has that too, and I never knew it. Only a couple of years ago there was an article about it and I recognized his symptoms (and he himself, too). Apparently it is actually very common, is it something like 10% of people being affected?

Yes. At the moment they offer several options to verify your identity besides the face recognition thing (I can't recall them precisely, but I'm assuming a standard Captcha and SMS-based verification).

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....

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.

(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?

Limiting factors:

A large number of friends would make this take a while.

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?).

Some third point I'm not thinking of.

Anyway, identifying pictures, when the target's friends list is publicly visible, seems kind of weak, on the surface.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com