Facebook to introduce one-time use passwords for public Facebooking

Have you ever used a public computer terminal and discovered with horror that the person who used the device before you left their Facebook or GMail accounts logged in, open to public tampering?

Maybe you’ve done it yourself, and some Apple store visiting jerk has updated your status to something embarrassing or tinkered with your settings. Even if you’ve never had it happen to you, the idea of everyone at large having the opportunity to play around with your personal data is a bit unnerving. Facebook is trying to increase the comfort level of those who have to use the popular service in public places on public computers by rolling out single use passwords to be sent to users’ mobile phones.

In a blog post, Facebook explains the new features and how you can implement them to avoid epic shame:

Simply text “otp” to 32665 on your mobile phone (U.S. only), and you’ll immediately receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. In order to access this feature, you’ll need a mobile phone number in your account. We’re rolling this out gradually, and it should be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

Also being added is the ability to log out of your account remotely. This will be pretty handy for the times you forget whether you’re still logged in on a computer someone else can access and it’s totally stressful:

Second, the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely is now available to everyone. These session controls can be useful if you log into Facebook from a friend’s phone or computer and then forget to sign out. From your Account Settings, you can check if you’re still logged in on other devices and remotely log out.

You can read Facebook’s full announcement here.

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