If there is a company that is on everyone’s lips lately, it is Facebook, or we should say goal, which is what it will be called from now on after the name change announced yesterday. The social media giant led by Mark Zuckerberg is being embroiled in numerous scandals, mainly related to privacy and security.
All this, however, is not preventing you from introducing new features on your different platforms. In fact, the social network itself Facebook has been showing a message for days to a multitude of users to warn them that they must activate “Facebook Protect” or they will lose access to their account. If this is your case, then we explain what this function is for.
“You have X days left to activate Facebook Protect”
Probably, if it has not happened to you already, you will see it in the next few days: when accessing Facebook (either in the app or in the desktop version), the message “You have X days left to activate Facebook Protect” appears. In addition, it warns you that “you will lose access to your Facebook account until you activate it” and adds that “it is mandatory that your account use this program which includes various more complex protections.”
More than one of us have thought that it was an advertisement or the typical link that downloads some kind of virus to your computer or mobile. Nothing could be further from the truth. This message comes from Facebook and although most users are getting it now, Facebook Protect is not new.
As explained in Genbeta, the tool was created in 2019 on the occasion of the last elections in the United States. Now, Facebook Protect is expanding to users around the world with the goal, they say, of “detecting more quickly any suspicious activity on the account through controls that allow us discover hacking attemptssuch as unusual login locations or unverified devices. ”
The deadline to activate it may vary from user to userThere are people who were marked on October 28 and others were marked on November 14. In any case, it is an additional layer of security that does not hurt to have activated.
And what happens if we activate it? Basically, that Facebook will analyze your account to detect if there are “vulnerabilities” and, if so, it will propose to solve them. These vulnerabilities can be of two types: that your password is not secure (it will suggest that you change it) or that you do not have two-step authentication activated (it will invite you to activate it).
In our case, it was the latter that we were missing, so we activated it with one of the three methods proposed by Facebook for this: an authentication app, an SMS or a security key. After two-step authentication is enabled, Facebook Protect is enabled.
If you have not received the message and want to enable this function, just enter your Facebook account settings> ‘Settings and privacy’> ‘Quick privacy check’> ‘How to protect your account’. There you can activate the various Facebook Protect two-step authentications or activate login alerts.