The Facebook Users Who Can't Get Their Accounts Back (nytimes.com) 71
"While many users are abandoning Facebook, fed up with what seems like a never-ending series of privacy violations, a small cohort find themselves in the opposite position," reports New York Times enterprise reporter Kashmir Hill. [Alternate source here.] "They've been kicked off the platform, and no matter how hard they try -- and they try really, really hard -- they can't get back on..."
In Facebook's version of a justice system, users are told only that their accounts have been disabled for "suspicious activity." If they appeal -- via a terse form that will accept only a name, contact information and an image of an ID -- a mysterious review process begins. The wait can be endless, and the inability to contact a Facebook employee maddening. Increasingly agitated, Facebook castaways turn for help to Twitter, Reddit, Quora, message boards and, well, me. Because I have a history of writing about (and sometimes solving) people's troubles with the platform, profoundly addicted Facebook users have found their way to my inbox, emailing multiple times a day for updates about their cases, which I do not have...
With more than 2 billion active members, Facebook has long been criticized for allowing bad actors to proliferate on its platform, from violent extremists to identity thieves. In May, the company announced that it disabled more than 3 billion "fake accounts" over a six-month period. "Our intent is simple: find and remove as many as we can while removing as few authentic accounts as possible," wrote Alex Schultz, Facebook's vice president for analytics, in an accompanying post... But the number of people complaining about disabled Facebook accounts has been going up for years, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission, which tracked three such complaints in 2015, 12 in 2016, and more than 50 in each of the last two years.
Once Facebook disables an account, Mr. Schultz wrote, it keeps the person behind it from rejoining by deploying "advanced detection systems" that look for "patterns of using suspicious email addresses, suspicious actions, or other signals previously associated with other fake accounts we've removed...." When Facebook reviewed 14 disabled accounts belonging to users contacted by The New York Times, the company said that just five had been banned with cause. Facebook suggested that the others should simply go through the appeals process again; most did, but none of their accounts have been reactivated so far.
According to the article, Facebook's voicemail system tells callers to press one for phone support -- then plays a recording saying "Thank you for calling Facebook user operations. Unfortunately, we do not offer phone support at this time." Then it hangs up.
With more than 2 billion active members, Facebook has long been criticized for allowing bad actors to proliferate on its platform, from violent extremists to identity thieves. In May, the company announced that it disabled more than 3 billion "fake accounts" over a six-month period. "Our intent is simple: find and remove as many as we can while removing as few authentic accounts as possible," wrote Alex Schultz, Facebook's vice president for analytics, in an accompanying post... But the number of people complaining about disabled Facebook accounts has been going up for years, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission, which tracked three such complaints in 2015, 12 in 2016, and more than 50 in each of the last two years.
Once Facebook disables an account, Mr. Schultz wrote, it keeps the person behind it from rejoining by deploying "advanced detection systems" that look for "patterns of using suspicious email addresses, suspicious actions, or other signals previously associated with other fake accounts we've removed...." When Facebook reviewed 14 disabled accounts belonging to users contacted by The New York Times, the company said that just five had been banned with cause. Facebook suggested that the others should simply go through the appeals process again; most did, but none of their accounts have been reactivated so far.
According to the article, Facebook's voicemail system tells callers to press one for phone support -- then plays a recording saying "Thank you for calling Facebook user operations. Unfortunately, we do not offer phone support at this time." Then it hangs up.
When relationships go bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
"While many users are abandoning Facebook, fed up with what seems like a never-ending series of privacy violations, a small cohort find themselves in the opposite position," reports New York Times enterprise reporter Kashmir Hill. [Alternate source here.] "They've been kicked off the platform, and no matter how hard they try -- and they try really, really hard -- they can't get back on..."
Almost like Stockholm Syndrome.
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It's like someone must love these people and force them to detox.
Although I suspect most of them will simply open a new FB account and keep going...
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Option covered in TFS.
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Know someone who'd built a business using Facebook, which at the time FB greatly encouraged, with suitable tools. One day her FB account got hacked and someone sent a bunch of porn to all her Facebook clients. FB locked her account and she couldn't get it back, and as a result lost her business.
Yep, lesson learned... don't rely on social media as a business platform.
Anyway, I expect that's the biggest reason those locked out are trying so hard to get back in.
I have to wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
I left Facebook sometime in the 2013-2014 range. Three times since then, the same person set up a new Facebook account using my old gmail address (the one I'd originally used for Facebook) - obviously he couldn't "verify" his email, but Facebook doesn't actually stop people from using a new account even if the verification email hasn't been responded to.
In all three instances, I must say that Facebook was reasonably good about shutting the account down once I complained (obviously *I* could verify the email address). After the third time, they did some sort of lockdown on new account creation from that old address - no big deal since it's not like I'm going back to the platform...
All that is to say - I have to wonder if a non-trivial percentage of the users mentioned in this story were doing jenky things like the dude who kept using my email address, and Facebook has marked those particular email addresses similarly to how mine eventually got flagged. I'm not saying they were being intentionally dishonest... I suspect the guy who used my address was probably just not the brightest bulb in the box. But perhaps Facebook intentionally has made those people's accounts hard to reactivate.
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I have a very old FB account that I opened with a bogus Hotmail account back when FB was just two servers in a backroom somewhere. I never post anything to it, or use it in any way, aside from occasionally logging in with it to check out someone's photos or videos without hitting the stupid FB nagging popup. I've never had to verify it (still don't) and I never received any email on the aforementioned Hotmail account, even when I still had access to it.
That FB account is extremely handy!
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After his account was disabled in July, he tried repeatedly to create new accounts using a series of new email addresses and found that the new accounts were disabled almost immediately.
Can't delete or change password (Score:3, Interesting)
Made the mistake of logging into my account from someones machine. Few days later I get some notifications that I've friended a bunch of people I had never heard of, followed by my account being disabled.
I of course went through the forms the OP mentions, and yeah, it's definitely frustrating. They just go around in circles, there is no way to actually contact a person, and what few forms you can find don't appear to actually do anything. Obviously they are trying to minimize costs, and paying humans to review disabled accounts would probably cost more than it would be worth to them.
I'm actually reasonably fine with that, but what pisses me off is that once your account is disabled, you can't delete it or even change the password. I wrote the account off, but it bugs me that it's just hanging there in it's disabled state. The one (seemingly only) thing you can do with your disabled account is download all your information. Luckily in my case there isn't much there, but still unsettling to just have a cache of stuff out there protected by a compromised password that I can't get rid of. No different than if your info is stuffed into a dump and posted in a torrent, but still.
It doesn't matter (Score:2)
Identity theft (Score:2)
Re:Identity theft (Score:5, Insightful)
This is where GDPR is so awesome. If Facebook create an account using my name, image and information it gets removed, either when I tell them to remove it or when the courts do.
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So how would someone who happens to have been born outside the European Union go about benefiting from that which you described as "so awesome"? In April 2018, Facebook announced that it would change its policies with respect to European Union users but would not change its policies with respect to users outside the European Union [slashdot.org].
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So how would someone who happens to have been born outside the European Union go about benefiting from that which you described as "so awesome"?
Apply for double citizenship with any EU country :)
How many Yanks can Ireland absorb? (Score:1)
Great Britain has invoked article 50 to secede from the Union. After Brexit, as I understand it, that pretty much leaves Ireland for anglophone residents of the United States. How many Americans do you think Ireland can absorb? Or would it be better to do "Spanish or vanish" sessions with that cartoon owl and settle in a different EU country? How much would it cost for the median affected American to train to become eligible to work in an EU country and then move there?
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Ask their political authorities so provide the same public protections that people in the UK and the EU enjoy.
GDPR is awesome, copy it.
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Assume for the moment that every major economic area adopts a counterpart to GDPR, including a counterpart to article 27 (requirement to designate a representative). This means every seller of goods or services will need to spend possibly thousands of euros or dollars per year for representation in each other major economic area. That could overwhelm small-time sellers and website operators, forcing them to geoblock.
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I know. It's almost as though major global economies need to work together to find common ground that enables global trade.
If only such things existed. We could call them the World Trade Organisation or the G7.
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You could start by writing to your elected representatives and telling them you'd like some of what EU citizens have. These things happen as a result of citizens applying pressure.
Re: Identity theft (Score:2)
This is exactly what I am going to do.
Just as soon as these flaming monkeys stop shooting out of my ass.
Nah, just kidding, Im sure writing my representative will work.
ðY(TM)
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These things work when enough people do them to ensure the method stays relevant. It worked for EU citizens -- public pressure is how we got GDPR. Yours is a council of despair
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My story (Score:4, Informative)
So I had created a facebook account. for this purpose, and I "friended" some family members as well.
7 or so years later the password I thought I had been using (but never had to enter), wasnt correct, and the email I had used to create the account was no longer a thing (the domain doesnt even exist anymore.)
Facebook has a nice automated solution. It randomly selects 3 of your "friends" and tells you to contact them outside of facebook and get each of them to give you some sort of one time code that it will give them.
Well, one of my "friends" was a deceased uncle, and of course he was randomly selected.
So now I have another facebook account. There were no other options.
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Wait, so part of the 'identity recovery' system that they tried to use for you was telling whoever was claiming to be you the identity of three of the account's "friends"??
Tragedy. (Score:3)
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annoyance (Score:4, Informative)
This crap is indeed the #1 annoyance that I've had with FB. I had a very interesting, deep conversation with someone many years ago. After a long weekend I came back online and was eager to hear their latest response and thoughts, and their account was blocked. Certainly for whatever other shit they did, but conversations on FB are hidden if an account is blocked or closed, so whatever they said to me (and I know they did because I got a pop-up that I had received a resonse) was now gone. That was a total cliffhanger in the middle of a really good thought and it haunts me to this day. I asked FB to unlock that conversation, at least so I could read it and didn't even get a reply.
That was many years ago, and it was my waking call to never, ever, have anything important on FB, and I now move every conversation off the plattform as soon as it gets more interesting than "how have you been?".
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I had a very interesting, deep conversation with someone many years ago.
Obviously you're lying.
proxied email (Score:2)
I setup my first faceache account with a proxied email address.
They let me use the account for a short time, then blocked access.
It's still there, disabled.
So I setup a new account using my yahoo email account
and now use it to contact douches who only use faceache.
Wrong email address (Score:2)
It happens I have a very popular name and surname in my area. It also happens I have an email address on Gmail after my name and surname.
And I don't have (nor will) a FB account.
All those omonyms of mine register their FB account with my email address and their phone number.
As there seems to be no verification step anymore, I have to fight against that with FB.
I have found my own workaround, but all those people won't ever get their account back.
Users are not customers (Score:4, Informative)
This is what happens when you are a user, but not a customer.
You have little value to Facebook. They have other users to monetize.
This would not be an issue if they were changing you every month.
This is like when a box of candy bars is lost at Walmart. They spend 30 seconds trying to find it, then write it off and move on. They don't care about those specific candy bars. There are other candy bars to sell.
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This would not be an issue if they were changing you every month.
Perhaps even less of an issue if they were charging you every month :-)
Do you talk with the bread you sell? (Score:1)
Can't get their accounts back? (Score:1)
GDPR (Score:2)
If this happens to a EU-citizen, and he will not be granted access to his own data and unable to let it cancel... this constitutes a clear violation of the privacy law. He may sue Facebook and Facebook will be fined up to 2,2 billion US$. Hope this happens!
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No. Disabling an account but still detaining the data is in clear violation of the GDPR.
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d Facebook will be fined up to 2,2 billion US$
May be. It'd need more than a single instance of wrongdoing to cause a fine at that level.
Although Facebook are certainly doing their best to get there.
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Hasn't worked out for Paul Joseph Watson [twitter.com] (relevant twitter thread)..
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PJW didn't want to sue facebook - I don't know why.
If he did, he would have won. That's no reason to claim the GDPR dosn't apply.
Facebook, Google and other non-EU-companies were already fined because in violation of the GDPR.
An user has lost her FB account... (Score:1)
and nothing of value was lost.
You funny (Score:2)
How much money do you have behind your FB account?
How much do you have behind your iTunes account?
Because for the life of me, I can't get access to my old iTunes account despite being able to change the password because I have access to the email.
A few years ago, I received an email that the account now suddenly was registered to a woman (I'm a dude) with the same last name a few countries over. I could change the password alright but I expect she must have changed security questions or some such or I just
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Yep, everyone needs a lawyer on retainer to deal with Facebook.
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of little historical value (Score:3)
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Hold on! Cats?
My dog has a Facebook account. Actually, he's now a dead dog. But he has a Facebook account.
MeWe might be far from ideal, but... (Score:2)
...at least MeWe isn't busy shooting itself in the foot every chance it gets.
I am eager to see Facebook get the reply, "Oh, Facebook... was that kinda like MySpace, back when?"
Cloud Computing (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to cloud computing, where you put your data onto servers you don't control, and where the owner of the server decides how much of your data you can use. This isn't a problem just with Facebook. This is the fundamental failure of the entire concept of cloud computing, and is the entire reason the PC revolution started in the first place.
Those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them, and here we are at the beach head of that failure.
That's what happens if you don't pay for something (Score:1)
Bears repeating (Score:2)
The oversize curse, and what to do about it (Score:3)
And I can do so with no adverse effects because I HAVE ACCOUNTS IN MANY OTHER SITES, of the same type, and I have arranged for friends/followers to be there too. No single-point failure; any site that screws up I drop. Temporarily, and if need be permanently. Do the same! (and it doesn't hurt to use multiple usernames/email accounts, and NOT give out your phone numbers)
Facebook is one-way. (Score:3)
Not worth the cost (Score:2)
I expect the average user makes Facebook a few dollars a year. Not worth spending a few minutes of a valuable employee's time, especially since most of the people who would complain are successfully identified scammers.
I've made Google hundreds of dollars through AdSense, but apparently I'm still not worth even a thought to them.
FaceBook + Instagram = FBI (Score:1)
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The irony is that you're the only poster under this story with a little Facebook icon next to your name.
they are likely cut off from more than Facebook (Score:2)
As someone who deleted Facebook, I can attest that you lose more than Facebook when you lose a Facebook account. You lose access to an entire ecosystem that goes far beyond their holdings.
They have pushed themselves as a universal login. There are many services and comment forums on the internet that you can't participate in without a Facebook account because they only offer Facebook as a login.
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There are many services and comment forums on the internet that you can't participate in without a Facebook account because they only offer Facebook as a login.
I've never seen such a place, thankfully.
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I've heard that many online dating apps utilize Facebook exclusively.
Where I encounter it the most is in the comment sections at the end of articles. I often just disable those news sources after encountering them so can't give a big list. One I found quickly that I haven't yet disabled is politico.com. If you try to post it wants you to login and only accepts a Facebook login.
Examples? (Score:2)
Like what services? I've never seen a Facebook-only web service.
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Who cares...? (Score:2)
Facebook is this generation's AOL. :facepalm:
mnem
And that is a correct answer.
Blogger lost 8 years of photos ... (Score:2)
... in a thread from Twitter [twitter.com].
I'm gutted...
8 years worth of posts have just disappeared from my Facebook Page here;
https://www.facebook.com/CarlB... [facebook.com]
The only things showing up are posts shared directly from my YouTube, or photos uploaded from my mobile phone!
Most are shared via my PC, & they've all gone!
Facebook apparently didn't like the link to his blog that he included with each post.
Facebook Invasion (Score:2)
Losing the game (Score:2)
Facebook started losing the game when they began censoring the platform and removing/punishing nipples and what they deemed 'hate speech (expressing any fact or opinion not shared by Facebook management).
It's fine removing fake accounts and people harassing others, but censorship is a losing game and the slippery slope will cause more and more people to turn their backs on the platform, pushed by endlessly repeating privacy violations and similar.
Google does this too (Score:1)
I have been locked out of an account after not logging in for some time and having moved house in the meantime. For some reason none of the backup options worked either. This was magically resolved after I moved house again.