How Many of Your Facebook "Friends" Can You Actually Recognize?

Mark Zuckerberg's fan page has been hacked several times in the past couple days, so its fitting that Facebook is rolling out a several new security measures. 

And this being Facebook, the new measures are in part social. One new feature, social authentication, works kind of like the standard CAPTCHA, which asks users to type in the text they see onscreen. 

With Facebook's Social Authentication, users are asked to identify a friend based on a series of photos. 

This seems like a clever integration of social and security, except that there are several pictures of me tagged on Facebook in which I am a dog, a woman and a tree. 

Hopefully this system will utilize some facial recognition to choose photos that can reasonably be identified. 

Beyond that there are the dozens of high school and elementary school folks whose friend requests I have accepted, but who I haven't seen in over a decade. Hope they haven't changed too much. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper