Facebook to introduce new frisking feature

Receiving friend requests from unknown people? No need to panic,  Facebook has everything under control.

Inspired by the recent instance of former Indian president Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam being frisked, Facebook has decided to introduce an online frisking application that would allow users to do a complete background check on folks sending them a friend request. This feature is specially designed to deter users who are turning Facebook into Orkut by sending friendship requests to all and sundry.

Friskbook?

“Yes, the feature will be launched soon. When we heard what happened to your former president and we were wondering – if this could happen to someone so well-known and admired, we should definitely use it against people who want to convert Facebook into a spam service. That is why we launched a beta version of the feature last week and testing is still on,” a FB employee said on condition of anonymity.

The frisking feature will allow users to do a thorough check on people sending friend requests – including their pics, their friends, and it even throws up a list of possible reasons why someone has sent a friendship request to you. The much needed application will help reduce the number of fake friendship requests sent by people.  

“Yesterday I received a friendship request from someone claiming to be Vijay Mallya. He said that he wanted to increase his friend circle to fund a bailout for his airline. More the number of people on his friend’s list, more will be quantum of bailout his airline will receive, the Mallya impersonator claimed. I immediately deleted the request. We need to do something to stop such bogus people from operating on FB,” said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission.