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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Many people on Hacker News saw my earlier post on trying to delete Facebook:

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/facebook-activated-my...

I have an interesting follow-up: they have rejected every ID that I have sent them. I took a photo of my passport and sent that to them, and then they rejected it. Same with my drivers license.

I'm left in limbo: I want to delete my Facebook account, but they insist that I first have to send them an ID, and they reject all the IDs I send them. They reject that ID with a form letter, so I'm not clear why exactly the ID is being rejected.

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You need to sue them. Simply filing the lawsuit should be good enough. Feel free to self file and make it messy, it doesn’t matter — your only real expense should be the filing fee.

It will cost them so much money to simply look at what you’ve filed that they will immediately delete the account because you’re a nuisance. Customer service reps cost a tiny, tiny fraction of the per-hour rate of their legal team, even when you’re dealing with people who are in-house.

Idk about lawsuits, but you could try comlaint with a consumer authority in your home country (the CMA in the UK, for example).

They don’t care about that. They’ve already co-opted the attorneys general and the politicians. It’s when you file a lawsuit and hit them in their earnings margins, which affect their share price, that they actually freak out.

Why would anyone, trying to preserve their privacy and limit PII collection, send a passport page to a company like Facebook? It feels like a variation on the Nigerian prince scam where they keep asking for more info to see how far you will go.

Yes, it’s as if they’re pumping for data to prime the shadow account.

Except there were no Nigerians https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/12/30/ni...

No one ever said there were.

You may be surprised to learn that he wasn't a prince, either.

Exactly. Mind blowing.

You could always go the route I go with uncooperative corporate entities. Send signature-verified letters about your frustrations and ensure them that your state’s attorney general is receiving copies.

I'd be interested in some more detail on this. What's the process look like and what are some common cases that this is useful.

Not OP, but I've had much success with making complaints to my state's Attorney General Office. I wrote about my experiences in a LPT [1] recently. Some states' Attorney Generals are more helpful than others, but in Ohio, any resident can make a consumer complaint in a few minutes online, and in my experience, businesses big and small suddenly take your greivances very seriously once the AG's office is put in the loop.

[1]-https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/9ci4qe/lpt_get...

Does anyone know if there's anything similar for the UK? As far as I know there's small claims court but that would only work if you can demonstrate monetary loss or damages which would be tough in this case.

Raise a case with the Information Commissioner's Office.

Have you used your Facebook credentials to create an account anywhere? That can reactivate a Facebook account automatically, and it can be a pain to decouple them.

Disable it, and uninstall any app you got. They already got your data anyway... (and now they even got multiple of your IDs)

> They reject that ID with a form letter, so I'm not clear why exactly the ID is being rejected.

That's so bizarre, though having dealt with corporate and governmental bureaucracy not too surprising. I wonder if you could go another route and see if you can post something controversial enough for them to close your account but not illegal, so you don't get in real trouble. Sometimes the best way to fight an bureaucracy is using its own irrationality against itself.

Would a DCMA work in this situation, in some way?

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