Saturday, January 6, 2018

Yesterday night, after two weeks in Facebook I am now excluded again: Facebook decided that they want to verify my identity before letting me continue using their services. They asked me to please upload a photo of yourself which clearly shows your face.

This confirms what Aatif Sulleyman wrote on independent.co.uk some weeks ago (29 November 2017): Facebook has started asking users to upload pictures of their faces, in order to access their accounts. It appears to be a new kind of CAPTCHA, and is being used by the social network to verify people’s identities. Facebook will lock you out of your account if you decide not to upload an image or upload an image it considers to be “invalid”, users say.

They promised “We’ll check it and then permanently delete it from our servers”, so I did a quick selfie and uploaded it. Will they recognize them as being the same face? For the moment I received already 2 messages saying:

You can’t log in at the moment

We’ll get in touch with you shortly after we’ve reviewed it. You’ll now be logged out of Facebook as a security precaution.

All this sounds normal to me. I can imagine that my “activity” on Facebook is suspicious: I had more than 300 new friends since I opened my new account on Saturday, December 16, 2017.

On Sundy night my account was activated again.