One problem with this Facebook Friendship Test thing – it will kill humourous photo tagging

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We’ve seen in the press today that Facebook will be putting in a place a “friendship test” where users may be shown pictures of their friends and asked to identify them – to prove that they are the true account holders.

However the official Facebook Blog says nothing about this so we’re not sure if this a bona fide feature that will be universally rolled out or just someone misinterpreting a little security test.

Anyway – if Facebook did go ahead with this friendship test – those joke photo tags would take a hammering. You know when your friends tag 80 people on a picture of some sheep and suchlike..? it’s going to be hard to remember that sort of thing out of context. And if that discourages people from joke tags, that will make me sad, because there’s nothing I like better than a humourously tagged picture of goats. Or something.

Though whether that transpires or not – this auto-tagging facial recognition tool is real – and will be coming soon. See the Facebook blog on it here. [screengrab above represents the new auto-tagging feature]

Anna Leach

4 comments

  • I’ve gone though this as well when I’ve tried to log in mobile only to be told I have to prove myself on the desktop first. A lot of my friends are random farmville neighbors whom I have blocked from my person info/activity feed so I honestly have no clue who they are. To make it worse is whenever one of those “support” week memes gets going and everyone changes their default pic to that of their favorite cartoon character or a photo of them as a child. The photo recognition usually gives you a few passes if you’re wrong as long as you get a set number right, however when half my real friends are showing up as Mickey Mouse I’m screwed and have to wait to retake the test and hope I guess better. This has caused quite a few arguments between my friends and I when I refuse to participate in the theme because I don’t want to stop someone else from being able to log into their facebook when they don’t know that I bare a striking resemblance to Spongebob.

  • Like Matthew said, log on in a foreign country. Some great pictures of my friends came up in a very crowded German internet cafe.

  • This worries me, quite a lot of my facebook friends are people I either dont know at all (people I added at some point so I could add them as farmville “neighbours”), distant relatives that I wouldn’t recognise in the street, friends of friends, or online friends. So not only will it stop you tagging silly pictures as your friends, it will stop you adding people you don’t really know as friends! I don’t want facebook telling me who my friends should be!

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