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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

Facebook will delete your account without notice, even after they've messed with your account once and reinstated it after making the issue public.

https://github.com/wit-ai/wit/issues/1946#issuecomment-88337...

Facebook employees will ignore your calls for help, and there is no proper way to contact them regarding a disappeared account.

You have to pretend to be an active Facebook user in order to access services tailored to developers, such as Wit.ai.

Imagine having to like YouTube videos and subscribe to channels, maybe post a comment sometimes in order to not wake up with your Google Cloud instances gone without notice.

That's how Facebook developer services operate.

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This is part of why I refuse to buy one of their VR headsets. I'll get a Valve Index if I can justify the expense at some point, but I won't get a Quest.

Amen to that.

I had an account I used for work (documentation, local API keys, etc) with a fake name that was also deleted.

I replaced that account with one using my actual name and a couple of friends, a phone number, etc, and I haven't had issues so far (like two years). I log into it maybe once every three months or so.

Weird, I have a fake account i created for testing something years ago and it still works fine, I log in with it maybe once a year.

I did take care to befriend a lot of random people tho, so maybe that matters.

>Facebook employees will ignore your calls for help, and there is no proper way to contact them regarding a disappeared account.

That's me. I don't have an Oculus but have heard good things about it. But I can't get one because my Facebook account was shut down without explanation in 2019. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response.

If a Facebook employee is reading this ... I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account. I want my own back.

Microsoft Live accounts get the same treatment. Those sons of britches cancelled my kid's Minecraft account and screwed up his ability to play with his friends. Because he was using my email address. He doesn't having an email address. He is 9 for crying out loud.

You don't need technology to play with friends. This can be a valuable early lesson to your child about genuine friendships.

Are you saying technology automatically doesn't make friendships genuine somehow?

What? No, ¬(Genuine Friends → Technology) is not logically equivalent to Technology → ¬(Genuine Friends).

With the lockdown rules in some places, yes you do.

I am perhaps unfairly assuming that we're talking about the US... name one place where children aren't allowed to play together.

Australia - NSW currently have the worlds harshest lockdown rules to date…

The works doesn’t revolve around the US as much as it once did ;)

Harsher than the lockdown in actual Wuhan in the early parts of last year? Prodigious, Australia!

How patronising.

> Facebook will delete your account without notice

Yeah, same for your Google and Apple accounts. So what?

Since when did Apple delete your account because you didn't post enough statuses or photos of your kid on the Apple social network?

> Since when did Apple delete your account because you didn't post enough statuses or photos of your kid on the Apple social network?

Did that ever happened on Facebook? Anecdotally I have 2 FB accounts that I haven't posted to in years, and they are still alive.

PS: I suggest reading the link GP posted.

In case you don't, here's a summary: a newly account created FB account only used to use an API was deleted. This is a far cry from "deleting your account because you didn't post enough statuses or photos of your kid".

No, my account was not initially deleted, it was disabled a couple of days after creation, and it was reinstated only after the issue has received attention on HN.

Since then I have used Wit.ai services for 8 months without issues, then two weeks ago my Facebook account has suddenly disappeared. The account no longer exists when I try to log in, it is not limited or disabled, it's gone, without notice.

Wit.ai apps have a state, they host intents and the ML models are continuously trained based on your input. All of that data is now lost, and I haven't even received an email.

Fb doesn’t delete accounts because you don’t post enough statuses or photos. One thing that people miss here is that lots of accounts are taken over due to password breaches, and if you don’t realize for months that someone is using your account to spam, and none of your friends are telling you, well you might just be a ghost account…

The account of one of my relatives was hacked in a password breach recently and I've been trying to contact any support representative at Facebook for over 2 months. We noticed this within 5 hours of the hack happening and the email being changed.

I've filed support tickets with Oculus using my own headset's serial number - no response. We've been through every Facebook "help" page you can possibly image (ID checks, hacked account support, responding to security alerts) - got automated responses of absolutely no help. I've even reached out to people I know personally who work at Facebook and, of course, no one seems to have any idea who to talk to.

Turns out there are no support reps for dealing with deleted accounts. That should tell you all you need to know.

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