Facebook has halted a sketchy practice of asking some new users for their outside email credentials in order to verify their accounts. After a Twitter user on Sunday shared a screenshot of Facebook asking them for the password to their email, the social media large faced intense criticism from security professionals. A spokesman for Facebook told The Daily Beast that it would no longer engage in this practice.
Facebook has maintained that the password prompt solely appeared for a small variety of users, specifically new users who were signing up for Facebook on desktops with email addresses that didn’t support OAuth. OAuth, which is an open standard security protocol used by Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook, lets users grant third-party clients access to their info without giving them their password.
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