The other day I was about to embark on a little bit of Facebook maintenance (no really, it wasn’t to play Farmville, YoVille or any of the popular web games) when to my surprise I received a “Security Check” informing me that there was a logged attempt to access my account from the United Kingdom.

If anything looks unfamiliar, we’ll help you change your password (this will help prevent people in the future from accessing your account without permission). Do you recognize the account activity listed above?

I was presented with two options: Yes, I recognize it or No. It looks unfamiliar. Since I did not recognize the activity, I clicked on the latter. The security check reminds me of the mechanism Google introduced to GMail in March of 2010 that alerts you when your account has been accessed from different geological locations, prompting you to acknowledge the alert or ignore it.

Once I determined that I have never attempted to access my Facebook account from the UK , the next step is to create a new password.

To help keep your Facebook account secure in the future, please select a new password. If any of your other online accounts (such as email) are using your current Facebook password, you’ll want to select a new, unique password for each of those accounts too.

While there are still privacy issues on Facebook, they deserve a big thumbs up on this one. I am glad to see that they are incorporating these types of validation checks given its user database exceeds 350 million users. Way to take responsibility!

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