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Facebook is quite clever about this. To verify your identity under some circumstances, Facebook shows you pictures of your friends and asks you to identify them. It is up to you to figure out the best way to authenticate your users.

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It's almost a clever idea, but what FB really does is show you pictures that have been TAGGED as your friends, when in reality it's up to whomever tagged them to be correct. And I've seen plenty of pictures of woodland animals, circus and carnival performers and other less respectable items tagged as my friends when they clearly are not. So, it can be worse than secret questions when you try to create an account somewhere and the secret question is "who is this?" and the picture is of a horse in heat doing what nature dictates.

However, I have heard that they do have some kind of face recognition technology in place to only show you real faces for verification.

So you get a bunch of pictures of your friends' babies?

Also, I don't recognize a lot of my friends because we all graduated high school together a quarter century ago and I haven't seen them since, unless we both attended the same reunion at some point.

Yeah, that's BS, I've gone through the process and had to identify friends by things like their elbow (lucky enough I knew the context of the picture and could figure it out).

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