What originally began as Trusted Friends has been redesigned, improved and released again as Trusted Contacts.

This is an account recovery feature that gives you way to reclaim your account should you ever forget your password or lose your account to a Facebook hacker.

Facebook defines Trusted Contacts as “close friends that you can call for help to get back into your account.” For obvious reasons, you’ll want to only choose people you know well and are frequent users of Facebook.

It’s a good idea to go ahead and enable this feature now. You don’t want to wait until you are having trouble accessing your account. You’ll need to head over to your Security Settings to choose your three to five Trusted Contacts.  Scroll down until you see the ‘Setting Up Extra Security’ section.

Facebook has these recommendations to select good trusted contacts:

– Choose people you trust, like friends you’d give a spare key to your house.
– Choose people you can reach without using Facebook, ideally over the phone or in person, since you’ll need to contact them when you can’t log in.
– Choose more people to help you. The more friends you choose, the more people who can help you when you need it.

Facebook will notify the people you have selected, so they’ll be aware of what’s going on if they are ever called upon to assist you.

After you set your trusted contacts, we’ll notify them so that they can be ready to help you if you ever need it.

If that fateful day ever comes where you can’t access your Facebook account, all you’ll have to do is reach out to your trusted contacts, and they can take steps to obtain the security codes you’ll need to recover your account.

We also recommend that you check out and bookmark our articles that shows you:

Four Things You Need to Do If your Facebook Account Gets Hacked

How to Secure Your Facebook Account With Login Approvals

Warning: Readwrite.com posted an article today that detailed how your Trusted Contacts could conspire against you to take over your account. Keep this in mind when selecting your contacts. If you have friends that are known pranksters, then you might be better off not trusting them in this instance. 🙂

Images credit: Facebook

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