Tech

Facebook will force more risky accounts to use two factors


For many years, Facebook gave users the option to protect their accounts with two-factor authentication. Soon, the platform’s highest-risk users will have no choice: The social network will ask them to lock their profiles with more than a password. Good.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has required since last year that advertising accounts and administrators of popular pages have the two-factor feature enabled. It’s not the only platform taking this step; In May, Google announced a move towards default two-factor authentication for all its users. And while Meta says its current initiative only applies to politicians, activists, journalists and others who have signed up for its Facebook Protect program, it appears to be some sort of experiment to figure out how to make two-factor authentication as easy as possible for everyone. turn on. Meta is also working to ensure that it can help fix any related issues that may arise for users around the world.

“We don’t currently have plans to roll it out to everyone, but we could slowly expand in the communities where it matters most – the communities where people are most likely to be targeted and where the consequences will be most significant,” Meta’s head of privacy policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, told reporters ahead of the announcement.

Facebook Protect started as a pilot project in the United States ahead of the 2018 midterm elections and expanded into the 2020 presidential election. Facebook automatically enrolls a number of prominent public figures in the program. process, but the company is also creating a mechanism for people to nominate themselves to the list, like signing up for all newsrooms. When users join Facebook Protect, they cannot opt ​​out.

Protect’s global rollout began in September, and Meta is currently offering the service in 12 countries, including India, the Philippines, and Turkey. The program has more than 1.5 million subscribers, including the first 950,000 who enabled two-factor authentication by proxy. Gleicher says the company will offer Protect in 50 countries by the end of the year, with more coming in 2022, like Myanmar and Ethiopia. In addition to authorizing two-factor authentication, Facebook Protect provides additional monitoring and automatic scanning on registered accounts.

While Google is the consumer technology company that pursues two-factor most aggressively, others have taken smaller steps. Smart camera company Amazon’s Ring two required elements to its several million customers in early 2020 following a wave of Ring account hacks. And in 2018, Twitter launch reminder to encourage candidates to turn on two-factor authentication. Social networks said in july that only 2.3 percent of its users have two-factor authentication enabled.

Facebook revealed ahead of the announcement that only about 4% of Facebook’s monthly active users worldwide have adopted two-factor authentication.

“Two factors have historically been underutilized on the internet, even by those most targeted by malicious hackers, despite it being one of the best protections available today,” Gleicher said. there to combat account intrusion,” Gleicher said. “To help drive wider enrollment in 2FA, we all need to go beyond raising awareness or encouraging enrollment. But we also have to make sure that people around the world, including areas where people have limited or limited access to the internet or smartphones, like much of the global south, have can continue to access these platforms”.

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