Facebook Asking The Password Of Email ID Used While Sign Up

With Facebook already in the clutches of recent privacy crisis, this new tool that exploits the user’s email id passwords for reaping unauthorised user’s contacts, sorts as a defective prominence for Facebook.

Whereby the request to enter the email id password is completely unclear at the instant of consequence. Facebook might have been doing so to authenticate user details, but demanding the sensitive password is utterly a deceiving move.

Nonetheless, the organisation is also extending an alternate option to detour password request by initiating the account through regular standard methods like code verification sent to a mobile phone or activating link sent to email ID. These alternative opportunities to verify the new joiners will be presented on clicking “Need help?” option present on the corner top right side end of the page.

It has been just two weeks after Facebook was reported to have collected ‘hundreds of millions’ of user passwords in ordinary plaintext. The company was found storing passwords of about 200-600 million users in plain text, which was accessible for over 20,000 Facebook employees.

Soon after The Daily Beast’s announcement, Facebook declared that it doesn’t save and collect any data. The company also added that it will stop the system of inquiring passwords completely. In a statement, Facebook said,

“We understand the password verification option isn’t the best way to go about this, so we are going to stop offering it.”

Although the pop-up asking users to confirm their email ID also states “Facebook won’t store your password” just beneath the password field, but how protected the keyed-in data are, given Facebook’s record, is an uproarious discussion for another day. This particular statement comes right after Facebook admitted to having amassed 600 million user-email-passwords in plain text that is made freely accessible by its employees.

“This is basically indistinguishable to a phishing attack…This is bad on so many levels. It’s an absurd overreach by Facebook and a sleazy attempt to trick people to upload data about their contacts to Facebook as the price of signing up,” Bennett Cyphers, a security researcher working with the EFF told the publication.