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Comment by tobrien6 | Hacker News Reader

Just make a burner Facebook account. You can do so with a burner email. Annoying, but not horrifying.

When you make a facebook account disconnected from a social graph (new email, or unused phone number) facebook shuts down the account.

Their position is clear. They’re fucking creeps masquerading any user experience they create as anti-spam.

Is this confirmed? I made a second account at one point with a new email and have had zero issues with both. Although I rarely log into the first one, maybe once a month or so.

It's still connected to the graph if you have another account accessed from the same IP. They know there's a connection from that account to yours.

Don't create a burner account. Facebook's TOS is to lock burners and require an ID to unlock, so you'd be locking all your games out of access.

They're going to lose their games if they don't make any account anyway. So if they feel strongly about not making a proper account, they might as well try with a burner one and see how long it lasts?

Again, I've had and technically logged into both accounts concurrently for at least the past 3-5 years. So unless this only applies to new accounts, I have yet to have either one locked out.

That's why I was wondering if it's officially confirmed somewhere.

This isn’t a 3-5 year old phenomenon.

I don’t think there are many people that are cognizant in how to break their social graph.

I’ve seen a few other hackernews comments corroborating it over the past year. But it isn't a common case so Facebook gets away with it.

You can sue them. I think this is what it will take. I've got an orphaned GOG account that they are not responding to me about, and I am definitely entitled to access those games.

True. It's all within your rights. I'm just trying to say they really don't like burners and won't make it easy to go that route. (If I had to guess)

You sue; they restore access to moot the lawsuit, but then tie your real info listed on the suit to your account, no longer making it anonymous. Win-win? /sarc

No, you could probably sue for access that does not need an account esp. if they have gravely changed the terms since you signed up.

Facebook has banned multiple burner account of mine, so I suppose it is confirmed.

They don't. You can have stand alone accounts. All you need to do is follow a few things like a beer company, car comapny or some other faceless corp.

Job done. raise the noise floor.

Yeah, if you forget to do that within a day you are locked out forever.

I've had a burner FB account for years and have never had an issue. What's your source for this?

I tried, in vain, to create a FB account using my work email address sometime after 2010 and FB demanded verification by SMS.

I ended up using my personal email address because that's how they want it.

So they're effectively saying you can't use Oculus gear if you don't have any friends (on social media).

I think for some service which for some reason had just FB signup I made a burner FB account and locked in all the privacy settings, I was thrown out of the account in under an hour. It kept asking for phone number which I didn't want to give.

Create a social graph of creeps only

In which case you buy a verified fake account and move on.

Just rewatching "Person of Interest" and came across "Finch" casually remarking that he invented social networking in order to increase the quality of data gleaned from his totalitarian surveillance machine... (specifically to fill in the social graph data...).

It makes sense... we've sold our data for the ability to tell 'Alexa set a timer'

The society at large was akin to natives of an undeveloped land being preyed upon by an advanced civilization. They were offered glass beads and trinkets, "a mirror to amuse yourself with, your highness!". And society at large behaved precisely as the historic natives.

I made a burner account to be able to login into certain sites that requires fb login. After 2 months without a phone number they disabled it, and since my email was also a burner they removed it. I had then to create an actual email account, and give them my phone number (I don't have a burner number) to be able to activate the account again. Besides my phone number, nothing else is real in there, even my profile image is from one of those "this person does not exist" sites.

Your phone number is probably already verified by being caught in their net from your friends and relatives. I assume it'd be a different situation with a burner number.

yeah thats not actually true.

My mum has a shadow facebook account for a number of reasons. She only has one friend, its on a shadow email. It's still active after a good 6 months.

it didn't require a phone number either. I mean it asked, but I didn't give it one.

So long as the emails dont bounce, you're good.

> So long as the emails dont bounce, you're good.

Simply not true. I suggest you try yourself and see how long the account stays unlocked.

> My mum has a shadow facebook account for a number of reasons. She only has one friend, its on a shadow email. It's still active after a good 6 months.

I mean I don't know how I can make it any clearer....

Well this is a pointless discussion. I've tried it and can just repeat myself, try it yourself and see your new burner account locked. I've no insight to how and when your mom created her accounts.

just because she got on the left side of the A/B test doesn't invalidate our experiences

Sometimes Facebook requires a photo ID to be submitted before "approving" a new account. Seems to happen when they suspect the person isn't real (fake name, or whatever).

My grandpa accidentally used a phone number to register when he was trying to log in. His original account got promptly locked and for months they would periodically lock it. He had to provide ID proof every time.

I don't use Facebook, but I totally recognize how valuable it is for my grandpa. Sadly, Facebook does not allow any mistakes to be made on its site, which is what older people tend to do when faced with new tech.

FWIW it's quite simple to make fake IDs that pass FB verification. Not that I support making FB accounts, even fraudulent ones. I'd like to see a class action privacy suit, because in conjunction with their real names policy, FB is forcing identity disclosure simply to use hardware.

I just tried and failed: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1295835462360338436

I used a realistic sounding name, I tried several email addresses that were rejected as blocked, eventually I landed on an email that worked and my account got immediately disabled.

I'm sure I could eventually succeed, but I don't believe that it's fair to brush this off as something that anybody could do easily.

Your tweet indicates that you were stopped by the "government ID required" hoop. I've been there. I'm no graphics design wizard, but I foiled this by (1) taking a photograph of my actual government ID, (2) copying letters around to spell the name I'm known by, (3) applying some noise and blur filters (4) downsampling, and (5) redacting all PII except name & face. Compared to making an actual fake ID, I call this quite simple.

I imagine that you could use a plausible but fake name and a plausible but fake "random person" image, but I'm not interested in actually interacting with that website enough to try.

You might try a clean OS & browser install, to avoid trackers, and maybe if you've been banned a bunch already, use a VPN (or stop using a VPN) or use Starbucks wifi or something.

That is, admittedly, a lot of work, even if it does bypass this absurd requirement.

I don't recommend or use that shit website anymore, so the simple solution is stop doing the thing that's hurting you... but if you really need it for some reason then putting ~30min into making a fake id might be worthwhile.

No. I'm not going to give them what they want. There needs to be a lawsuit.

Not possible. I tried doing that once, and Facebook demanded I give them my phone number, which I obviously denied.

You can make a burner email account that doesn't track you around the web, and other places.

Is it possible to do that with a Facebook account?

if you're not logged into it in the browser, it can't follow you around

Not entirely true. If you've logged in at all, and didn't purge your cookies and local storage, they might still be tracking you everywhere you visit.

third party cookies allowed means they can follow you around logged in or out. They can also follow you around by your fingerprint (IP+various browser info bits that uniquely identify you)

not good enough. maybe if you only play solo games, but once you play with others facebook will get enough data to get an idea, if not identify who you really are. you may get tagged by your friends or family, connected to a location, etc, many ways to leak personal information. the only way to stay safe is to not log in to facebook

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