First came the news that Facebook was enabling anonymous access to applications and not comes news that the social networking giant is thinking about moving beyond passwords.

Speaking to a group in Australia, Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik said he would like the social media site to move to hardware tokens and away from passwords. The Computerworld report states that Facebook was encouraging all of its 1 billion users to adopt two-factor authentication.

Google offers two-factor authentication with an app that can be downloaded and linked to a specific account. Twitter users can opt to have a passcode sent to their mobile device as an extra layer of authentication. Facebook has a similar system in place for when users are logging on from an unusual device or location.

Moving away from passwords and toward two-factor authentication appeals to Stefancik. In Facebook’s security preferences there is an option to have the mobile app create codes that can be used for login. How exactly this works isn’t immediately clear

When asked about the eBay hack Stefancik reiterated the point that consumer’s shouldn’t use the same passwords across multiple sites.

A similar hack would not be possible against Facebook, Stefancik says. The social media site houses their data over multiple sites in different locations.

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