a recent online privacy mis-adventure for a friend ended up with him calling me to help him login into his Facebook profile. somehow he had managed to lock himself out of his own profile and he was unable to bypass the password reset settings. this prompted me to think how much is too much? on one end we have activists crying for breach of privacy by Facebook, then we have mortals crying foul when they are locked out from their profiles due to the security features of Facebook. what we don’t realise is that it all boils down to a choice. even Facebook has given you a choice, on the level of security you want or rather may need. “Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without.” as said by Merovingian in Matrix. are we choosing the levels of security or are we made to choose them? the effort we had to put in to restore my friend’s account impressed me of the security a Facebook account provided but the same was cheesed off by my friend as it was as good as getting locked out of his own house without the keys.
looking at the recent cases of people complaining regarding their FB profiles getting impersonated or being hacked, i guess its good to have this kind of security, at the cost of your being patient, i don’t think they are asking a lot from us.