Facebook Patents New Social CAPTCHA System

Facebook has filed for an interesting patent on a new technology that it hopes will help ward of the scammers and hackers on Facebook. The patent describes a new CAPTCHA system that will make use of the user’s social graph, dubbed the social CAPTCHA. This CAPTCHA will pose several questions to a user that Facebook suspects might be fraudulent; questions related to the user’s social network that only the real person should be able to answer. Examples will include a question to identify a person from the user’s social network from their picture, or presenting a name while asking the user to pick the right picture for that person. Would such a system work and prevent identity theft and other undesirables on Facebook? We’ll have to see if Facebook decides to incorporate such a CAPTCHA system in the near future.

Matthew Chung
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Patent, social, social networks