I got hacked and Facebook banned me
emilycordes.com
emilycordes.com
> Thing is I’m a Mum of two who has just moved to a new area. Facebook groups have offered me support and community, and Mums I’ve met in local playgrounds have added me as a friend so we can use messenger to plan playdates. Without these apps sadly my little social life becomes a lot lonelier, and harder.
This is the pernicious effect of Facebook's dominance among social networks added to their policy of poor support. It's not really an "optional" social network if large swathes of your social circle have started using it for essential life functions, it's more like a utility and should be regulated like one. And no, telling all the mums at the playground about how Facebook's ban policies are bad and we should all use the Fediverse instead is not going to work for the average person. If anything, it's more likely to mark you down as one of those weird parents to avoid.
It wouldn't be good for your power company to have the option of arbitrarily cutting you off as a customer, and never giving you a chance to get back your power. Similarly, we should regulate Facebook to the point where they are exposed to genuine regulatory consequences for disrupting people's lives.
They control the primary forum for local community chat, they control the swap-meet (facebook marketplace); I have no access to any of that anymore, it used to take place on many other forums, but it has centralized on facebook, which I don't use. A fair few local orgs use facebook exclusively for communication. Some of them have public pages, some don't.
I don't really care, aside from missing the odd deal on the marketplace that I can't participate in, but I imagine this could be quite important to other people. There's got to be a better way, but I don't know what it is or how to get there.
I noticed that when vaccine availability in the US was constrained during the first few months of 2021 and local governments were organizing vaccination clinics, several of the events were announced only on Facebook pages. Several towns/counties didn't seem to have websites, or didn't put the events on the ones they had, instead preferring to announce them on Facebook.
It was scary to think that folks locked out of Facebook for whatever reason did not have access to those notices unless informed by a friend or family member.
More media (Facebook etc) means reaching more people, that's not a bad thing, but it IS a bad thing for everyone else to get the info late if the govt only updates their "official" site once a week or something, but updates twitter every few minutes.
Yeah, no government agency should publish anything (however trivial) exclusively over a private platform. As far as I'm concerned it should be illegal and anything they do post on social media should always be a mirror of the same content posted to a public platform and retained according to the laws that agency should follow for their documents.
People should never have to worry about a private company being a barrier between them and their own government, and no private company should have the ability to pick and choose who can view what the government publishes, or to secretly modify that content (perhaps selectively), or to remove content that should stay part of public record.
Even ignoring all other issues, this alone should be enough.
This could very well be a geographical thing - but where I'm from, Norway, FB is the de facto platform for anything social in communities. I've heard that in other places of the world, people used WhatsApp, Discord, etc. - but where I'm from, it's FB.
Local classifieds, local hobby groups, local community information, local sports, culture events, etc.
Luckily there seems to be a push in moving people elsewhere - but with all the older folks primarily using FB, it's going to be hard. I think it's just fine for things like hobbies, classifieds, and such - but real infrastructure shouldn't use FB as their main platform for sharing information.
Remember that WhatsApp is also Facebook. As for Discord... isn't it a gamer thing?
> I think it's just fine for things like hobbies, classifieds, and such
No, that's the point. If it's used for all of this stuff, then people "have" to be on it. Group interaction media _is_ part of the "infrastructure" of society.
No, that's a common misconception. I use Discord all the time and none of them are about games
Not in my personal experience. I see some pull to switch to Matrix, and some groups I know use Telegram (e.g. LibreOffice).
It is a general purpose web based chat similar to slack that was targeted towads gamers. Anyone can use it for anything. Think fancy web based IRC.
So I am hoping for/dreaming of an international developed open source solution. But the existing ones I am aware of are unlikely to ever fill that role.
That said, reading so many good, thoughtful posts here... and then one more from you(!)... it made me think: Why isn't there a global "goverment/non-profit facebook"? Think: Strictly open source software. Hosted in "the cloud". Gov'ts can do: (1) on-prem, (2) public cloud (AWS/Azure/G), but they control the env, or (3) pay for a hosted solution (Oracle/SAP/Hitachi/whatev). #1 & #2 have infra run using gov't workers, but #3 is run by private company. A bit like hosted/cloud Wordpress vendors.
The idea: Only gov't officials have accounts to post/update public info. There are no regular user accounts -- so no one can get banned. Then, if people want to have posting / chat rooms about a gov't facebook page, they can "reverse link" to a Discord, or something like it.
Funny example: If you live in an area with a terrible dept of motor vehicles, the DMV gov't facebook page would publish the usual info about hours, locations, rules, etc. But then people would run Discords to argue/post about which DMV location has the worst customer service! Assume the Discord server is strictly independent of gov't facebook... so Discord admins can ban whomever they like (if people say offensive stuff). But no matter what silly things people say on a private Discord, they can never be "banned" from the gov't facebook -- it is public, just like Wikipedia, but no regular users accounts.
And I can already think who already has the sales contacts and engineers to get it done: Microsoft. I can already hear the tomatoes being thrown at me... but it is true: They could do it, and it might be a huge money maker. Or SalesForce, because a lot of gov't website now need eforms to do online gov't stuff. Makes sense, I think. Two other orgs who could do it: Mozilla and/or Wikipedia. They don't have the sales contacts, but they are well-trusted by gov'ts around the globe.
For example, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles website, available at https://www.txdmv.gov/ . They host the site, well, they pay contractors to manage and run the site. The Texas DMV controls the content on the site; companies like Facebook or Discord can't control what the State of Texas wants to publish on it.
They're making more vanity license plates, and so they have example designs and polls related to the designs on the site here: https://www.txdmv.gov/motorists/license-plates/eview we can share this link with our friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, iMessage, LINE, your own personal blog, whatever you want.
Except every gov't agency re-writes this software. My point was to create a common standard that can work in 100+ languages and all kinds of useful features for gov't websites. Maybe Wordpress can already do everything...
Any how does Texas DMV host? On-prem, public cloud, or 3rd party hosted?
Either way, each DMV and other state agency or agencies in other states is going to want to craft the site in its own fashion for its own "brand". Whether or not this is a good thing is debatable, there's pros and cons each way IMO. You're going to need to have certain kinds of integrations and plugins into byzantine ancient computer systems that each agency also owns and manages. It'll practically never be some quick one-click deploy to make a DMV site; every DMV between all the states are different. They have different forms, different workflows, different database systems for their old systems, different priorities their state legislatures have given them, etc.
Furthermore, what else is there to move to that has the same UX as Facebook but none of the drawbacks? Proprietary solutions are paid (and too expensive for casual usage - Slack's lowest plan starts at around 6 bucks/month), free solutions are going to have the same problems as FB, FOSS solutions lack the UX and care more about the tech than the UX and solving the actual problem.
I read this sentiment all the time here but I am not sure it's true. Element works just fine.
My family has moved from facebook to instant messaging over the years, the great thing about IM vs social media is that all IM is the same so there is no real switching cost platform-to-platform, whether you use whatsapp or matrix or whatever
> FOSS solutions lack the UX and care
I don't want to defend the FOSS solutions here; indeed they could benefit a great deal from more love^Wtime spent on their UX.
It's rather that I find the facebook UI really annoying and frankly uninspired. Still looks like 2000s web design for essentially a database, but constantly trying to nudge me into doing stuff against my own interest. Not a high bar to clear.
For that matter, the vast majority of people don't have much "social capital". That's the very effect that Facebook so ruthlessly capitalises on - individually we don't have much power, and formerly we would have to expend considerable effort to maintain our social position and our local community. Personally, I see it as my moral responsibility to do my very best to be an engaging and interesting person in real life, and not to contribute any of that to the social quagmire of Facebook.
Also - moving to a new area, especially if you don't know anyone, is *hard*. Back in the bad old days before Facebook, leaving your community and anyone you knew was a huge decision that was not undertaken lightly. Is it essential that we have digital tools to make that easier?
They can rebuild their life alone. They can not rebuild social network alone.
> Also - moving to a new area, especially if you don't know anyone, is hard. Back in the bad old days before Facebook, leaving your community and anyone you knew was a huge decision that was not undertaken lightly. Is it essential that we have digital tools to make that easier?
Back in the day, if you wanted to build social network, you would went to places where existing people go to. You would introduce yourself in way customary for times and place.
It used to be knocking to neighborhoods door uninvited to introduce yourself. Nowadays it would be super odd unwelcome behavior.
Discord is the other option out there.
Meta's tools are somehow simultaneously inclusive and very exclusionary.
First, this is a very clear example of how the manner in which Facebook operates has a very disproportionate effect on women. My wife followed me and gave up social media, and found it incredibly difficult, much more so than I. It was also notable that many people told me that I was doing the right thing, etc etc, but the general response my wife got was "how will anyone keep in touch with you?"
>It's not really an "optional" social network if large swathes of your social circle have started using it for essential life functions
Putting aside the trite observation that, for two years, young families being able to socialise was considered absolutely non-essential, Facebook is as essential as you make it. Ever since it took hold in universities, people have asked (with varying degrees of irony), "how do you exist without Facebook?". The answer is - just fine.
>and no, telling all the mums at the playground about how Facebook's ban policies are bad and we should all use the Fediverse instead is not going to work for the average person.
We generally don't mention it, and get on with having a good time with people (which includes arranging for social continuation - ie, meeting up again).
>it's more like a utility and should be regulated like one.
The idea that an online echo chamber is essential to life, is very depressing. Community exists in the incidental and in the repetitive rhythms of life.
Edit: The response to this is very interesting. I am very glad I returned to my native country instead of trying to build a life in the US, as it seems that something invented as a way to keep up with college girls has become deeply ingrained as a social necessity in a very short space of time.
For two years, those young families did a lot more socialization over internet - be it facebook, zoom or whatsapp. If anything more socialization and coordination move there.
Also, this is not so much about young families, this is about primary caregivers. Most of their time is necessary spend alone and if they want to meet with anyone, they have to coordinate online.
Tell me about it. The number of very young kids I now see clutching a phone or tablet is heart-breaking.
>If anything more socialization and coordination move there.
I very deliberately decided to reject that "new normal". Do you think that it's a good thing?
>Also, this is not so much about young families, this is about primary caregivers.
Do young families not have a primary caregiver? The effects we are talking about apply equally well to both, if you insist on making that distinction.
If you go to work, you don't have this issue (regardless of whether both work or only one). The super isolated lonely primary caregiver thing is what happens when you are stay at home. Babies and toddlers are fine being with parents only. Within young family that has that problem, this is a problem of one person. The rest of them dont even have to be aware.
> I very deliberately decided to reject that "new normal". Do you think that it's a good thing?
This is what you wrote: "young families being able to socialise was considered absolutely non-essential, Facebook is as essential as you make it". I am saying that pandemic did not shown any of that. Many young families had 2 adults at home constantly - making loneliness issue much different. Others had one close friends they met with regularly.
And most seen socialization as important and moved it online.
I don't get what point you are trying to make. Yes, my family has a primary caregiver (like practically every other family). No, it's not me. However, this means I have an exceptionally good understanding of the very issue that is being discussed. I care deeply about the issues that person has as they raise our kids through their youngest ages, and I do whatever I can that is best for all the members of my family.
>Others had one close friends they met with regularly.
Good for them. Where I live, it was illegal to have other people in your houses until mid-2021. Cafes and other hospitality locations were closed for around the same time. My local playground was literally chained shut. Tell me it's fun meeting other families with babies in the winter in an empty field (it's not). Particularly when those other people spend the whole time dancing around you on tip-toes trying to keep the government-mandated 2m separation.
>And most seen socialization as important and moved it online.
There's the catch - I don't regard online-only interacting as "socialising". Most of what makes mere words into the all-encompassing experience known as "socialising" has been removed.
> I don't get what point you are trying to make. Yes, my family has a primary caregiver (like practically every other family). No, it's not me. However, this means I have an exceptionally good understanding of the very issue that is being discussed. I care deeply about the issues that person has as they raise our kids through their youngest ages, and I do whatever I can that is best for all the members of my family.
Only stay at home person is actually lonely, others are not. No matter how awesome emphatic the other person is, the other person is not that lonely. And in my experience, dont really understands what is like nor consequences of it, despite the best intentions.
Like I said above, being stay at home is way more isolating then pandemic was. That is something easy to understand if you was at home, but people who were not refuse to hear.
> Tell me it's fun meeting other families with babies in the winter in an empty field (it's not).
With babies, we would walk with strollers, we did it every day in winter too. With babies the emptiness of field does not matter much, cause they don't do much anyway and sleep or look. In general, in here, people don't socialize in cafes with kids lockdown or not. It was going outside.
I could not disagree more, and my partner would say the same. What was so absolutely terrible about Covid lockdowns was that the few coping mechanisms available to primary caregivers in those early months and years of their childrens' lives (cafe visits with friends, having other people visit, going to the park and talking to others, etc etc) were completely removed. Covid lockdowns were near 100% isolating (and by design).
>The work from home of other partner is already massive change.
And this made it worse again! Not only does one partner have to try to look after young children literally isolated and not allowed to leave the house, but the other is supposed to sit staring at their computer and concentrate on work while ignoring them?
>It was going outside.
I don't know where you are from, but the Covid restrictions here were not only very strict, but people were incredibly compliant. The parks and such were empty! I was surprised. I had many lonely trips to our local playground with my little boy.
> I could not disagree more, and my partner would say the same. What was so absolutely terrible about Covid lockdowns was that the few coping mechanisms available to primary caregivers in those early months and years of their childrens' lives (cafe visits with friends, having other people visit, going to the park and talking to others, etc etc) were completely removed
now imagine you still have all those problems, but without a parner to help you (can't go out to cafe due to having to watch kids, cant talk to nonexistent partner at home, cant invite friends over because youre banned by facebook from your communities, etc.)
>youre banned by facebook from your communities
It's also fascinating to hear the words people use when FB has become so deeply ingrained in a culture's social fabric. My "community" does not exist on Facebook.
indeed, it's easy to dismiss a use case that you don't personally have, given a sufficient lack of empathy
>It's also fascinating to hear the words people use when FB has become so deeply ingrained in a culture's social fabric.
yep, fascinating and true. we'll have to come up with a good alternative if we want that to change
My wife went through a difficult personal journey around the time of the birth of our second child, when she decided to leave all social media. She decided that the benefits of this, which include a mind not addicted to the endless drip of social media, and also giving our kids a chance to live distraction-free, outweighed the disadvantages. Yes, giving up social media when your personal time is already incredibly disjointed and isolated is difficult - Facebook does provide some (at least in my wife's opinion) superficial and temporary benefits there.
>we'll have to come up with a good alternative if we want that to change
What was wrong with what we had before? That is, cohesive, in-person communities. Finding a FOSS alternative to Facebook, etc, as the solution to society's ills is, IMHO, missing the point.
For example, your post contains no meaningful suggestions for the person in the article, you just essentially say their use case isn't important and is really just a social media addiction, so I guess they should just get over it?
> What was wrong with what we had before? That is, cohesive, in-person communities.
If you have some suggestions there which would help the person in the article with their use cases, please share. Like, which specific communities exist where they live, for the same purpose, with the same friends, and without a social media presence?
Note that a lot of those in-person communities organize and communicate over social media, so you'll have to exclude those as alternatives.
The underlying cases are important, in fact very important. It's literally building your social life. But I personally think FB is a horrible tool to use for that.
I'm not saying it's easy. You might not get to meet the same people, or many at all. I think it's very different over in the US, as it seems your community groups are deeply entrenched in FB. But - if we think that's bad, someone has to make a start, by doing things another way.
You can disagree, and do your life as you see fit. And just hope you don't get banned from the platform that you have built your life on, but have absolutely no control over nor ability to plead your case.
Edit: A useful analogy might be - imagine a group who have changed their diet to consist almost entirely of candy samples from grocery shops. The response to those shops no longer giving away free candy should not be "but how will these people continue to get their nutrition from free candy?".
and to come up with bad analogies that don't fit the situation to justify a bad take that doesn't fit the situation
I don't think I'll be able to convince you to stop ignoring the problems described in the article
so, have a good one!
They succeeded in making it quite clearly, imo:
> This is what you wrote: "young families being able to socialise was considered absolutely non-essential, Facebook is as essential as you make it". I am saying that pandemic did not shown any of that.
in other words, they were correcting your incorrect statement about the inessentialness of socializing during the pandemic
>They should not refer the recipient to the content posted on the Internet that is necessary for their understanding of the broadcast. The broadcast of the presence of the broadcaster on other portals and on social networking sites should be information devoid of any advertising features or promotion of the portals or services themselves - we read in the KRRiT statement.
>We will react when there are elements of hidden advertising in the broadcasts when referring to social networking sites. It will not be that the sender must make the recipient aware of the fact that he is advertising a different website, but inviting to, for example, Facebook should not be common or too frequent - says Katarzyna Twardowska, spokesman for the National Broadcasting Council.
>In the event that the National Council determines that the message actually contained an advertisement, the sender will face the consequences specified in the act. KRRiT may call for the cessation of broadcasting, and if that does not help, impose a penalty. However, such issues will be considered individually, usually as a result of complaints about specific cases - adds Twardowska. - It is worth noting that the matter concerning the promotion of social networking sites arose precisely from the complaint of the listener
TLDR: If you keep telling viewers to visit FB it will be interpreted as hidden advertising for FB and you will get fined.
No. Regulatory consequences for transgression are ineffective. They are applied after the fact, when the damage has been done. The abusive company can still delay and disrupt the user, force them through lengthy and Byzantine arbitration and act like total cocks because the fines are fiddling small change.
Instead of punitive measures Facebook and the other social media companies require technical regulation. We need forced interoperability. As a licence to operate, commercial social media sites larger than a few million users will be required to present a standardised API so that you don't need to be a member of Facebook to inter-operate with its users if they invite you to.
It is Facebook's ownership and control over it's users that is the central problem, not any aspect of its quality of service per se. We need to move this whole "walled garden" problem to a new space, in which they are not "Facebook's users", but simply social media users who happen to be able to read/write Facebook assets, amongst many other alternatives that work together.
Personally I think the mandated interoperability/public API is a better solution, in the best case it could lead to some actual competition and if that didn't happen atleast people who chose to leave Meta/FB would have options for maintaining the social connections
Edit: I have mentioned before in previous comments (not this post): After Dodd-Frank regulations in the US, global investment banks really changed their behavior when fines became massive. So massive, it was seriously altering quarterly revenues and hurting stock prices. I favour the same type of regulation for social media network companies. It is the only way to make them listen to the law.
It amazes me that on one hand, every law related to technology that the government passes in the US, HN is almost universally opposed to. But they trust the same lawmakers “this time to get it right”.
Would you support if the data leak fines were similar? I would. To be clear, I am talking about global investment bank-style "know your customer" (KYC). If retail/commercial banks leak customer PI, the fines are _immense_ in 2022. Most of them now have enormous security teams, or they pay AWS/Azure/G to do they same via consulting / cloud fees.
And they don’t pay cloud providers to ensure security. AWS [1] for instance always stresses the “Shared Responsibility Model”. AWS is responsible for security “of the cloud” the customer is responsible for security “in the cloud”.
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-mode...
There is no way in the world that any cloud provider would ever take responsible for customer workloads. If you make your S3 buckets world readable - which is really easy to do. That’s on you.
[1] I work in consulting at AWS, all opinions are my own.
Defaults matter, and AWS cares more about ease of use over security. Which helps explain their security position.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/access...
However, you do not need to use custom policies - it's checkboxes on the S3 bucket creation page. And the wording on them is obtuse AF, and I know what I'm doing with AWS IAM.
https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-the-anonym...
I’m of the opinion that entities other than, eg Meta, should be responsible for identity verification.
Of course, public service/public utility commissions were set up in a time when the law was often written to be equalizing rather than to simply entrench power.
If there were something like a PSC for larger, systemic social media etc. it could, depending on how it gets set up, be a total positive. I appreciate reasons to be skeptical it would have that effect.
So the fines should be substantial enough to act as a deterrent. Then another option is that, for instance, if Facebook gets sued and judge agrees to take the case then Facebook should pay for the claimant's lawyers the same amount Facebook pays their own so they have a fair chance. E.g. if Facebook budgets $5m for the particular case legal defence team, they should give the claimant $5m to spend on their legal team.
This goes beyond social media. Consumers are being asked to "buy" content that is associated with a single account that can be banned at will. "Free" email accounts are a critical part of many people's online identity.
We need regulation that protects users from capricious bans and forces companies to be able to justify their decisions to ban and face consequences when they get it wrong. I'd be fine if such regulations also included consequences for users who abuse the appeals process.
Do we want to establish a “Department of Social Media Enforcement?” Should “Christian Mingles” not be allowed to ban people that it wants?
I am not proposing any further restrictions on what reasons an be provided to ban people.
I do think that plaforms that encourage people to become invested in them (email providers, social networks, online media "sales” patforms, etc) should have a legal obligation to explain the reasons for the ban and provide the banned user the opportunity to correct any incorrect information that led them being banned.
I don't know if a standardized arbitration process, and expansion of the civil court system, or something entirely different is the best way to approach this.
You tone comes off as very combative, like you are looking for a fight and making assumptions about my political stances that are both incorrect and detract from your ability to have a conversation.
Factually false. Some laws reduce that power. For example, a law that made it illegal for police departments to keep the proceeds of asset forfeiture would reduce the power of government over individuals, not increase it.
In this case, it does indeed create more government control, though it could be designed to limit the amount of additional control that is granted.
> all people have to do is go to another website
How does that help me when the email account I lost access to is already tied to most of my online life?
How does that help me when the music, books, movies or software I paid for is tied to the account that was banned?
How does that help me when the "website" is part of a market duopoly and losing access to it means my company will go out of business and I'll have to fire all my employees?
"go to another website" simply is not an adequate response to any of the above scenarios. Please proffer an alternative other than "it sucks to be you". The only other option I see is to make these companies common carriers and mandate interoperability / account portability. That seems like it gives the government far more power than simply mandating a fair dispute resolution system.
This could possibly be mitigated by giving group moderators higher privileges than Facebook moderators. So Facebook could submit a ban request, but the group admins would have to approve it. Facebook could block a public feed but not full functionality.
And how forced interoperability would work would differ in each country, but at least in the US, this could be accomplished imply by tying Title 42 privileges to federated interoperability standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
Does that also mean that the company has access to all of your friends data?
Look no further than the 12 chapter 99 section GDPR and the shit ton of cookie banners it brought the web.
Would you let any company have unfettered access to your product via APIs? Should they have rate limits? Should they have to pay for access? How do you prevent a third party API from posting spam? What are the rules around being able to block the API when it behaves maliciously? Who gets to decide what malicious behavior is? How do you protect the data that is siphoned off from the API?
Just throwing up our hands and saying "we simply need Facebook" doesn't help anyone, and doesn't help to fight the pernicious effect of Facebook's dominance. I agree though, that some kind of regulation is part of the solution--but not because it's some kind of essential utility, but because of it's ill effects (like smoking).
Despite her initial fears about being so dependent on it, this might actually have been a blessing in disguise--just the encouragement she needed to let go and move on from this harmful platform.
She articulates well why losing her account is an inconvenience. We can at least acknowledge that her feelings are valid.
Yes, if Facebook completely disappears there is a short moment of arranging alternatives and all goes on.
However if they ban single individuals from their platform this can have a notable impact as they are disconnected from social circles, which picked Facebook as their communication channel.
And yes, Facebooks relevance is still different from water, but it compares maybe somewhat to phone operators and other such utilities, which are under some regulation regarding required services and interoperability between networks and it's worthwhile to think how communication in a contemporary era can be ensured. Learning from mistakes made in phone operations, taking into perspective that development isn't "done" yet, ...
The telephone is not an essential utility that people will die without, either. And yet the phone companies were regulated as utilities. Such regulation ensures that normal people with no monetary/social/political clout wouldn't be denied participation in society or burdened with undue hardships (communication, socializing, transportation, etc). This is a not-insignificant part of government's function in service to its citizens.
Just because you may be rich/powerful enough to not need such services does not mean that they are unneeded.
In this case though it is a response to another tech person. Maybe the general public would get some sympathy here, but this person had a vanity domain that they used for something important then let expire, and should know better.
> The telephone is not an essential utility that people will die without, either.
There are obvious circumstances where this is very much not true, so your call for empath back at you: just because you have never been in a position where phone comms are that important…
True, and you just proved GP's point.
Fyi... the person in question (Emily Cordes) doesn't appear to be a techie. Her "About" page says: Emily is an Exercise Physiologist
She's a non-techie that happened to get a domain name. She let it expire without realizing the interconnected consequences (email address recovery) which seems realistic for non-techies to overlook.
Even a tech company like Microsoft with dedicated IT department made the news when they accidentally let their domains expire: passport.com, hotmail.co.uk
As someone who has been in situations where calling 911 and getting emergency services to a location ASAP I can 100% argue having telephone service available saves lives. More people would absolutely die if telephone service wasn't as widespread.
Telephones connected people in a specific way because there weren't really alternatives. Not sure that entirely applies to Facebook.
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It’s more tone death to think having government have more power over social media can possibly be good.
Another example is my local pay sports provider, which doesn't even have a phone or e-mail support option anymore. It's Facebook or Twitter only. So I ask my spouse to contact support, since I don't want to engage in social media that way.
I think Facebook and Twitter are more essential than we may think and should be regulated like a public utility.
In my opinion when we have a oligopoly of social media providers (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), they should be regulated by local laws and government. Same for providers such as Microsoft, Google and Apple. It must be unacceptable that you have to provide your private details for usage and can get banned from a service without any prior communication. And without the ability to appeal or arbitration.
A definition could be a means which is itself regulated to be available to any customer.
So a phone support line is one because phone service is regulated, available and interoperable. Email counts because it is open, standard and decentralized (an email provider like gmail can block you but you can simply go elsewhere or self-host). A support office staffed by humans is also good because everyone can walk/bike/drive there. (But as a counterexample, a support office inside a military base wouldn't count since most people can't get to it, unless 100% of the customers are in that base.)
A support line controlled by a private entity which arbitrarily blocks people from access, such as FB, clearly doesn't count.
Imagine walmart is the only large store near your house, and they ban you from that store. Walmart is not an essential utility, since you have a convenience store and a gas station in the same town too, and you can also drive 2 hours to another large store if needed.
If all of your social circle is on facebook, it's very inconvenient to ask them to move somewhere else just for you.
So now we want to give the government more power to make things “more convenient” instead of just asking your friends to use another application?
No, the government doesn’t need to step in because you can’t be part of the cool kids and they won’t relocate the party to your house.
That's not a good-faith response. Of course they can go to a different website, say, ycombinator instead of FB.
But if their child's school is only reachable via FB, that won't do much good.
Numerous local governments announced COVID vaccine availability exclusively via Facebook. Citizens relying on their government to inform them of vaccine availability did not receive the information because they were not on Facebook. So far about 15 million people have died from COVID. Are you suggesting that none of these people contracted COVID and died while they were trying to get the vaccine but were unable to because they did not receive the government-provided vaccine information from Facebook?
Yes, if FB disappeared overnight, we'd all wake up to happier world and life would go on.
But that's not the scenario. The scenario is that suddenly your FB account disappears overnight while the rest of the world, all the groups you need to interact with, continue to exist only in FB. That's a terrible dystopia for the victim.
Personally I'm lucky no group I need to deal with uses FB much or at all. But I do know there are groups for whom continued FB access is vital. It shouldn't be so and/or FB should be regulated to force them to allow access to anyone who needs it. Allowing a private company to shut someone out of society is morally incorrect.
I agree. Another example: Facebook is full of support groups for different causes or issues. There are thousands of groups helping people struggling conditions like cancer or other health issues. However much people might dislike that Facebook hosts these groups, the question remains: where else can people congregate online to discuss their conditions? Self-hosting a discussion forum is not an answer: ironically it excludes thousands (perhaps millions) of non-technical users who won't know how to install a discussion forum. I wish there was an alternative to Facebook, but for now Facebook is the friction-free option.
Feel free to require whatever you want to participate in the conversation, but I should be able to read my local town's Facebook page without submitting my papers.
It’s Facebook, create a new account?
There are frequently discussions here about how to address the particular abusive characteristics of one of the tech companies or sector with what I believe are solutions that are too high level. It is the authoritarian, centralized planning, communist mentality that current tech for some reason devolved into that is the problem, I don’t see how more specific planning is the solution. How many more authoritarian utopias have to end in misery before we stop letting abusive people ruin things and cause misery?
What we need is what the government should only ever be doing s as it relates to this is, ensuring competition, which is done by imposing standards that prevent capture and lock-in. Yes, that is a tall order once the government is as corrupted and captured by the very corporations and sectors that are so abusive, however I believe the only way that can be addressed is precisely by pushing for keystone legislation that requires the whole industry to self organize specifications and standards and protocols that allow the seamless communications and transportation of data between systems and services, and makes all data and content the property of the creator, without extensive and burdensome regulatory requirements to transfer that ownership. We must end digital slavery!
All these issues are actually rather easy to understand once one has been able to remove oneself from the toxic and abusive relationship that effectively the whole tech sector employs with its users. It’s all there, textbook abusive relationships 101.
I would map all the common characteristics of abusive relationships to the behaviors of tech companies (or most companies theses days), but I think I’ll keep it shortish, even though I guess it may be helpful to see, for people who cannot see the abusive relationship of the tech sector because they’re in the abuse.
Just one example that is relevant to your point; controlling access to loved ones … “you’re nothing without Facebook, now obey Facebook and how Facebook wants you to speak, think, act, and even dress. I wouldn’t need to control your speak and hurt you if you would just obey Facebook”. And of course many of the Battered Wife Syndrome sufferers rationalize with all kinds of things like “Facebook only beats me (controls speech and behavior, depersons, shadow bans, etc) because I misbehave and think wrong things, and it knows better what’s good for us all” on the left or “well, it’s a private company and they can do whatever they want to me because if I want to eat (be part of society ) I have to obey because my data and access to communications is a slave that is private property”
Let’s end digital slavery, can we please!
Facebook's properties are replacing the telephone for most people and now one company's algorithms can remove you from your communication tools because it feels like you are not valuable to its owner.
I didn't expect anyone on Hacker News to say anything _but_ this. Even your take isn't quite right. You're saying it's all but mandatory in certain circles. Can't a person simply like Facebook for what it is?
I like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The impact on my life if I suddenly couldn't watch it would be minimal. I'd have to find some other source of entertainment for an hour a week.
Whether I like Facebook or not, people in my social circles use it for important communication and coordination. Getting cut off from that would be disruptive. I would have to take active steps to insure I continued to hear about upcoming events that are important to me. I would have to convince friends to communicate using something other than Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger (surprisingly hard given it takes under 60 seconds to install and activate Signal).
Would you be still saying this if your power, water, phone, and internet lines were permanently cut off because some random person hacked your account(s) for them?
Those are private companies, and there are certainly people who manage to live in the woods without any of the utilities mentioned, so they are technically "optional" as well. We have schooled ourselves to think of social networks as optional, but in 2022 I'd argue that they are just as non-optional as the telephone; and perhaps even more so in certain ways. (e.g. What was the last time your local government called you over the telephone? But they are probably replying to Facebook comments.)
If they were, perhaps you'd see more of an uproar.
Facebook is fundamentally new and different precisely because its scale is equivalent to something as large as a utility; but it gets that scale based on automated processes. Once the automated processes begin fucking up people's lives with no recourse, we should start bringing in regulations.
Yes, they're a regulated utility like water, power, natural gas, etc., and can't discriminate services based on political beliefs, unlike regular privately owned companies who are protected by the first amendment (in the US). Why the internet isn't regulated like a "utility" is beyond me. It clearly is as just about everyone and everything relies on it now. Just like it's very hard to live and do business without power or water, it's just as hard/impossible to live normally without the internet.
I joined Facebook in 2020 - immediately secured, 2FA switched on and all the settings reviewed.
I lost the account in 2021 after I made the world's dullest post about the 12V system in a Nissan Leaf. In a Leaf car group. An automatic system determined my post breached community standards and required me to verify my account to continue using it.
Fiiine, OK, I upload my driving licence. And it won't accept the upload. I try JPEG, PNG, different sizes, different browsers, different computers. Nothing seems to stick and after a certain number of attempts it says I have to wait a week to try again. After as couple of rounds of this the expiry deadline passes and my account is gone.
I created another without hassle (and still treat FB as the contact method of last resort), but was still surprised at how easily they nuked a genuine user doing ordinary things.
I sympathize, I have lost Amazon accounts under similar circumstances. I got so angry I stopped doing business with them for a year. But I found them useful enough I opened a new account even though I despise the company. I just don't purchase any digital assets from them anymore.
I never "purchase" (aka: rent) digital assets from anyone, unless I'm buying DRM-unencumbered open format media. I argue that any restriction outside of copyright and patent is not a sale. It is a form of a rental masquerading as a sale.
I too have been bitten by shitty hardware remotely crippled, and bad software that was force-converted to cloud crap. Never again.
If that means I stay firmly in the piracy school of though, so be it. I'm not going to be taken advantage of again.
It's extremely helpful and productive, but it has a darker side. The processes are rigid because machines are rigid, and the designers cater to the 99% cases.
But then the 1% happens, and you're left out in the cold.
In the old world of humans and paper, as wasteful as it was, it was easy for exceptions to be made if the clerk was willing, and if they weren't you'd find another clerk, or a clerks supervisor. The processes tended towards being flexible.
But today, you increasingly don't interact with any humans, or if you do don't be surprised if, in your unusual case, they say "the computer won't let me".
As governments move more and more towards digitization, and embrace machine learning, I expect similar stories might unfold - only it won't be with an opt in social media website.
At this point it’s just routine for them to have their account taken over and lost periodically.
Painful as that is, those of us who tend more technical should be helping people understand the nature of social media companies, and encouraging backups in whatever form is supported.
... and then helping push them over the edge to find other ways to communicate with friends, share photos, etc. "Do it all on Facebook!" was novel, 10-12 years ago. Now it's just a lack of creativity and a willingness to help add feet to the next yacht.
I found it quite confusing as to the motivation, and seeming gap in the armour of automated bans.
As far as I know, many people get instant banned if they attempt to setup a second profile for their Oculus or similar, I assume the motivation is to get a fake account that has history to avoid this. What surprises me though is that changing password, profile picture and full name in quick succession + attempts to recover / report don't trigger this mechanism/some kind of review process.
Nowadays cloud backups are almost becoming default which is a good thing imo.
One of my first jobs out of college was an account manager at a big corporation. It was an easy job. Half customer service and half sales. The guy in the cube next to me was always chided for being a dinosaur because his desk (in his words) "looked like a tree just puked on his desk" because of all the paper copies he had floating around - but damn if he couldn't find a contract six months old or an email with some promise he had made a client a year earlier.
It was his file system and it worked magically. You'd ask him a question and he'd look around and then dive to a stack of copies of contracts, come up with the right contract and let the customer know the details so quickly. Customer's loved him because he could reference things so quickly and was so sharp with conversations and notes he had taken. No problem if his laptop crashed - he already had a paper copy. He always referenced himself as a go-between the paper world and the digital world that was quickly consuming his talents.
I heard he retired a few years back - but he was the guy you're talking about to a tee. He was around during the transition to email from everything being paper. Dude still made it work, even when he knew his time had come and gone.
I spent a decade in the public sector digitalisation of Denmark, a country that competes with Estonia about having the most digitalisation in the world.
I fully believe we should legislate against automated processes taking decisive actions.
It’s inefficient, but what I experienced in regards to laws is that they are way more messy than anyone working in digitalisation seem to realise. We build a system that let employees report their business-related driving, in Denmark you get a tax-reduction when you drive in your own car for work purposes, and the laws covering it is basically an A4 page of tax-law that seems sort of clear. You have 3 set of taxation rates that you get to deduct from, they are meant to be used for different types of work related driving. Simple, right?
Well, it turned out that in 9 different municipalities there was 9 different ways to interpret that A4 page of law text, and, more than a 100 different union agreements on how to extend or alter the tax law for certain groups of workers.
As hilarious as it was to sit through meetings with different sets of tax people from different municipalities getting into heated arguments about who was break the law, it was also sort of eye opening for me at the time. Because we made this as an OSS project where we bought the development that we project managed. My role was part of the project management team as a code-reviewer/specifier of sorts, and all our estimates simply went out the window when we realised we really had to build all those different ways of interpreting the law, as well as making room for future alterations. In the end, it didn’t extend the project that much, I think we still delivered it on schedule but it was a very different product with lots and lots of setup required, because the different municipalities needed to be capable of deciding which rules were turned on for which groups of workers, as well as control over how the approval system was handled by everything from tax lawyers going through every submission to secretaries to RPA robots simply clicking accept on everything.
The system wasn’t related to decision making automation that couldn’t be easily undone by humans, because it was still a relatively simple system. But if that sort of complexity is what you get from some of the simplest legislation we have, then imagine what it would look like for laws covering thousands of A4 pages of text.
There are certainly decisions that should not be fully automated. But this has very little to do with the account recovery issue we're talking about.
I believe that account recovery, and more generally proving your identity, can be done automatically with greater accuracy and far more securely than any process involving humans.
We have secure, electronic, government issued identity documents that are perfectly suitable for automation. Let's just use them! If we must legislate then let's introduce a right to prove our identity using our government issued ID.
There are other issues related to oligopoly accounts that are hard to solve. But proof of identity is not one of them.
And what do you propose as a solution if your government-provided identity gets lost or stolen or hacked?
Or for people who have a hard time getting such a doc? (note: Sweden currently has a crisis because it can take over 1 year to get a passport).
Or for people who live in countries which don't have these systems?
Are you really ok with uploading a video of you holding your passport every time you want to log onto a service (see "id.me" controversy)?
Now, what might be nice is if the government used a highly secure crypotgraphic system to allow identity verification, but drivers licenses and passports aren't that.
Report the old one stolen/compromised, get a new one, use it in the account recovery process.
>Or for people who have a hard time getting such a doc? Or for people who live in countries which don't have these systems?
This is a core responsibility of any government. It works well enough in many countries and we should not wait for the last government on earth to get its act together before using it. It can be gradually introduced country by country.
>Are you really ok with uploading a video of you holding your passport every time you want to log onto a service (see "id.me" controversy)?
Having a right to prove your identity using an official ID is not the same as having an obligation to do so. I would only use it with a few key accounts that I trust (and with financial institutions where ID checks are mandatory).
Also, I wouldn't have to hold up my passport at all, nor would I have to do it every time I log in. The platform would read the passport chip once upon registration or during account recovery and check if the picture on the chip matches my face.
>Now, what might be nice is if the government used a highly secure crypotgraphic system to allow identity verification, but drivers licenses and passports aren't that.
https://www.icao.int/Security/FAL/PKD/Pages/ePassport-Basics...
I'm sceptical as to whether you can avoid it becoming an obligation.
You sign up for $SOCIALNETWORK. Some opaque 'bot detection' process deems your account 'suspicious' and locks it. They offer to unlock your account if you prove your identity using an official ID.
That makes it obligatory in practice, if not in theory.
What's happening right now is that we are sacrificing a lot for the financial benefit of corporations and for politicians' control obsession while we can't use some of the same technologies and capabilities for our own benefit.
We often have an obligation to prove our identity using a government issued ID, but we have no right to do so when we want to.
In my view, that's a bad deal.
I share an attitude with Frank Zappa here. Zappa was rather oddly against "Love song lyrics". He said they led to poor mental health by propagating unrealistic expectations of intimate relations.
Similarly, I think that Science Fiction has a lot to answer for. I personally love most SciFi, but like Orwell the Cyberpunk genre was misinterpreted as a blueprint instead of a warning, and many people carry around disported, unrealistic and quite mentally damaged ideas of what a "good" technological society should look like.
And in my opinion the reason for most of the conflicts that arose is a failure of expectation management what the digitization effort can accomplish (in a reasonable budget): Software systems are cost efficient only with mostly homogeneous processes. Their development is such an expensive undertaking that it can only compete with individually trained humans when you can amortize the costs over large amount of use cases (c.f. https://xkcd.com/1319/ ).
Thus the first step should always be to get everybody on-board to give up some of their non-essential individuality. There is no need for car taxation to change from municipality to municipality. (Be aware of the reverse phenomenon as well, though: Individual needs getting thrown under the rug by systems that are too rigid or simplistic in the wrong places. See all the falsehoods programmers believe about {names, time, gender, ...} articles. TFA in my opinion is not an example of that phenomenon btw.: Facebook, like Google, is justifying cost cutting at places which obviously need trained human support, with a fetish for technological solutions.)
Of course this homogenization is not something that my parent poster would be in any position to accomplish, so this is not meant as a critique. Also I agree with EnKopVand that automated processes (or even overly rigid bureaucracies) should not take decisive actions on their own.
Well, let’s just say that while you’re completely correct, I don’t think we should wait for our countries to become less Kafkan, which is why I’m a fan of simply banning the automated decision making. Maybe if you hurt the bureaucracy where it matters (cost) we might actually get some officials who deal with the root cause of the issues.
It's already arrived, in the form of the Australian government's "Robodebt" scheme: 20,000 automated debt notices per week with minimal oversight [1]. The government denies it killed people, but there are claims that it did [2]. After several years a court eventually stopped the scheme and awarded about $2 billion in compensation, but by then a lot of lives had been ruined.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/31/not-c...
It does not matter what moderation scheme they use -- automated or beauraucratic, if you gift the town square to a private entity and allow access to it to be determined hy their whims you get this.
The targeted people understandingly answer back (not even using slurs or hard insults - just being rude enough to shut down the person attacking them).
Once this is done, the trolls post the direct link to the comment in one of their Facebook groups (usually reserved for that purpose and containing nothing but such links and filled with oblivious fake accounts that use similar patterns i.e. "Aloph Hiller III").
They then brigade the comments and mass report them. The algorithm perceive this high number of seemingly unconnected users reporting as having a lot of value and acts on it.
In certain communities, almost everyone is used by now to have their account locked out for months long periods with some people outright losing access forever. This created huge migrations to other websites or apps.
Facebook does not responds to calls to delete the harassment groups even when people organize to try and report them - due to the fact that the trolls are savvy enough to be invisible to the algorithm.
In my eyes, this is one of the ways Facebook is bleeding users. Especially the younger ones.
When a domain expires, there's a grace period, and just checking daily whether a user's email's domain is expired, and if so texting them or otherwise notifying them to change the email, would have been sufficient.
This wouldn't even require _that_ many checks since the total number of unique domains to check is probably low. 99% of all users will be on gmail/outlook/yahoo/etc, and all users using the same domain only require a single check a day for the domain not having lapsed.
TheDong isn't suggesting something she could have done. TheDong is suggesting something Facebook could have done.
The only way this would not be waste is if fixing it would do something to reduce the amount of ill will towards facebook which is quite intangible and unlikely to add up to covering the costs. But who knows what calculations are being made, or how they may change in the future.
And knowing the ASN of a domain is also quite helpful. If anything changes (e.g. geolocation of ASN or different domain registrar) you can easily force the user to confirm this while they are already logged in.
Source: I am doing this for my tholian.network products.
That’s not reliable. A domain can be deleted before expiration.
Better cover most of the cases than none.
In this case I think it'd be simpler to just do a DNS check, either NS alone or A/MX. Scales better. If NXDOMAIN is returned over a period of days then the domain can be flagged.
Or is it that they just don’t care?
I'm saying that there are many ways of improving service for users. If we prioritize those ways, I doubt doing checks for expiring DNS would be near the top.
The advertisers are the customers.
Almost any website, app or online activity that requires logging uses email based authentication. Do you think all existing web sites and apps should verify the expiration of mail domains? And what about phone numbers? A user can lose his phone number, should they verify that, too?
No - it probably wouldn't be worth it. But it could absolutely be worth it (weighing bad outcomes against amount of effort needed to prevent those outcomes) for the biggest sites with billions of users.
Yeah, it's not currently possible for phone numbers, but that's not a reason for not doing it for domains where it is possible. It's also easy to imagine a privacy-respecting public registry for phone numbers, which only reported when the ownership had changed.
Or just wait at least a week before emailing a password reset PIN to secondary email addresses. I reported this exact vulnerability 4 years ago:
Treat your FB account as throw-away that could disappear anytime for no reason at all and no possibility of recovery.
Facebook does have a process for getting things like this fixed very quickly. The trick is you need to know someone who works there.
I was locked out for six months then circumstances meant that I knew someone at Facebook. I told them the problem and it was fixed in 24 hours.
Make enough noise and someone at FB will hear and fix it for you.
The people at Meta/FB who are in charge of this stuff have IG models throwing sex at them to get accounts restored. I'd be surprised if those guys take action to fix the account of someone who isn't making it....ahem worth their while, so to speak.
https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...
Maybe that's true for some things, but the community standard violation/restriction code seems like it's always been a mess, every fix breaks something else, every new FB feature makes it fail in new ways, and there's no real motivation to make it good (who cares about violators, right?).
I feel it's so bad because because it's been constantly patched under pressure every time media catches on something on the platform (e.g. after the livestream of the Christchurch shooting, FB started handing out livestreaming restrictions like candy for every minor violation, and to my knowledge it stayed like that until today). I honestly would love to see the code like I love to watch terrible movies.
It's so consistently and innovatively bad, and I have such a hard time thinking nobody violating CS has friends at FB, that the unmaintainable mess is the only explanation I can find.
This also works with Google wrt Google Play. They even have "developer relations" people specifically to handle this kind of communication.
I abandoned my account awhile back, but I remember them suddenly demanding a photo id for "security reasons" or else they wouldn't let me in. I just closed the tab and decided I was all done with facebook since I wasn't crossing that bridge. A few months later I tried to login again and suddenly they didn't need the id anymore.
I couldn't find anyone at FB/IG willing to help me with this. There are pictures of my friend who passed away years ago and apparently this is going to stay online forever...
I've contacted a few colleagues that work there and haven't seen anything happen.
My wife messaged the account and said at least take down the photos of our kids, and the person actually responded saying they would, so now most of it is private.
I am a white male, but according to Facebook I'm a young asian female... The background picture is still my house though.
Oh well.
1. A legitimate account has long history of posting organic content.
2. The account email/password gets changed.
3. The account starts doing spamming.
Seriously, how hard is it? How hard is it?
If Facebook really care about the legitimate user behind the account, they can easily get this problem fixed.
If I am wrong, please enlighten me why it is a problem difficult to solve.
Meta / FB / IG have a reporting form for when identity theft is involved, and it requires that you send supporting documents like your driver's license and a picture of you holding the drivers license. I did all of that.
Here is the entirety of their response:
"Hi,
We have fewer people available to review your request due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.
We’re only able to review requests for the most urgent cases. This means we can’t review your case right now. Please try again at a later date. Thank you for understanding.
The Instagram Team"
I would encourage anyone to delete and leave, but having a spammer take control of your account before you can do that has to be a nightmare.
Anyway, I am free, so I am going to go outside and play with a stick. Too much keyboard for one day :)
I think this is pretty inaccurate unless you’d be haunted by being unable to delete any profile/timeline data, ie. Education/work info and post data. Ad profiles tend to be useless after a few months, just make sure you’re actually blocking and limiting tracking wherever you can.
One of their point is from your experience, unable to contact ENG or CZ speaking person directly and solve issues.
Meanwhile the attackers are posting scans to her page with impunity.
We're talking about the company that used 2FA numbers for advertising purposes pretty much immediately after saying they would only use them for security.
On the other hand, having your own domain gives you many advantages, including not having to fear that you'll lose your email address because a big tech company decides to ban you for no reason (which is tangentially related to what happened to OP).
So, it's a bit of a double edged sword, but can be good as long as you are diligent about renewing your domain.
I had something similar happen to my Instagram account.
A few weeks ago, I got a popup inside IG to verify my age. Not wanting to give them my real age, I set my age as 0. The popup playfully said that my age can't be 0. So I set it to 20 years and the popup got stuck. After a few taps, my account was marked as underage account and I had to send my photo id to get it back else it will be deleted permanently after 30 days.
I though about all the photos and messages in my account and while it would be sad to let it go, I reckon IG's ban was a blessing as the quicker I let it go, the free'er I would be from Meta's clutches.
In in the end, I didn't verify my account. By now, it would be wiped out by a cronjob.
---
The sooner you realize these companies(and Meta in particular) don't care about you, the better. These are all rented platforms and should be treated as such.
Don't invest too much in these platforms and if you must, invest in a personal blog hosted on your own domain.
Instead of assuming they don't care about you, assume scale and sometimes incompetence. Things happen, people are striving to be better, but scale comes with pain sometimes, sadly.
At sufficiently large scale, there'll be people who have bad experience with the platform. The teams are always working on improving it, and security of accounts are obviously important, but sometimes things go wrong for some unforeseen circumstances like in this case.
This would mean that automation is built for trust, not for "don't call us anytime".
Everything facebook so far has automated when it comes to customers is actively helping scammers taking over accounts more easily, rather than helping actual real people that are who they say they are.
But, facebook's incentive is ad business, that's why things like this will never get prioritized.
Not to be terribly facetious, but ads pay the bills. I'm not aware of any significant money-making ventures Meta is involved in outside of ads. In the end, that makes all employees "ads people". All ventures, projects, features, enhancements, and bug fixes are to serve the ads machine. Unless, of course, there is legitimately a new market opportunity that will create revenue without ads.
Even the Oculus arm of the company is really just a new platform for ads in the end.
But the "monetizable eyeballs" are interchangeable, 100% so.
I think we do assume scale when we pass harsh judgments on large corporations.
At sufficiently large scale there will be employees that just don't care about their users. It doesn't mean every individual at Facebook is like this, but Facebook as a corporation, and a certain percentage of employees, do not care about the users. That's not to cast judgment on you or your team, I believe there are people who genuinely try to help at all corps :)
Unfortunately, like you said, the reality is that as the scale of a product increases the quality will decrease on both sides of the transaction for some people.
I was at google before here, and things there are much much more stricter to the point where even an internal employee cannot do much help for themselves [1] as it happened to me with my own account. That's also not good. Things do get better, but they probably have different trade offs.
I am not sure if "scale of product increases quality will decrease". I remember twitter fail whale, and seeing it constantly, I remember android bugs from google, I somewhat remember fb's own issues (but this part is fuzzy as i have been a very light user - twitter is more my jam vs fb). Also early on internet was cleaner, spam and fraud was less, crypto money scams were nowhere to be seen at the time. So i'd say things actually got much better, maybe "attention to detail" diminished, which i guess i could see.
There’s something to be said for being able to get support for issues from a human being who is empowered and resourced to solve your issues amicably.
It makes a huge difference. Since I’ve worked hard to rid my personal and professional lives of non-paid services and all social media, I’m just a happier and more consistently productive person.
Google took the opposite approach and delegated everything to automation, which had other problems.
Being a paid user also probably helps with contractual side of things, but ianal.
Everything here is my personal opinion if it weren't clear.
Solving this type issue should matter most above all, its the grass roots of users that's made FB what it is.
I personally don't give out my passport info unless i absolutely have to. IRS recently implemented this id.me id verification thing and I only went through it because i had to.
Also people use Fake Ids all the time. Even when you present an ID in person, it would be somewhat fakeable.
Imagine now doing it over laptop camera, with tech like deep fake it will get even easier eventually.
In my IRS case, automated system couldn't get me verified, so i had to wait i forgot how long to get to a person who just said "yup, you are you" and had other limitations and probaly would quickly run into scale problem if it were peak times or peak use cases.
If you want to put a positive spin on things, you can assume that their intention is to not let spammers overrun the platform, or kick off legitimate users, as a matter of protecting their brand integrity. The costs of being 100% effective at this are prohibitive due to diminishing returns in any such enterprise. Within the organisation there are probably a great many people who would love to help an embattled user, trapped in the Kafkaesque nightmare of having to deal with the corporation. It's just a matter of jumping up and down and screaming loudly enough. You can chose to see that as a positive example of the kindness of humans, even humans who work in gigantic corporations, or you can chose to see it as an example of offloading costs on to the consumer to protect profits. Tomato/tomato.
I don't know if anyone ever designed a fool proof system with 0 bad cases, but feel free to prove me wrong.
Yeah my money is definitely on 'they don't care'
Okay, maybe you're fine that some amount of people are just collateral and the system is not going to be adjusted to minimize that because there are other priorities (eg. meta's share price).
But when people need to spread their wings and fly off in to a fantasy world in order to pretend that isn't happening, then it's probably not going to end well for them / be conducive to their mental health in the long run.
A weird analogy would be saying "US should have no business growing to 300M if it has XM people under poverty level". Sure it should strive to do better, but doesn't mean that number can reach to 0. Sorry i couldn't think of anything else close to a billion users with systemic problems that's not a bigcorp so had to use government.
Scale is an excuse used by corporations to get away with whatever they want. Blaming things on scale is exactly equal to calling your customers a mere statistical data point.
"I'm sorry, we through your meal out the window, but 98% of the current customers dining in got their meals successfully. Here's a website with no contact info to help recover your meal."
If these "scale" corporations like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the ilk actually cared about their puppet customers, then they'd go read the work by Stafford Beer and other complex systems thinkers and learn how to take care of unhandled variety rather than creating it behind the excuse of scale.
Blaming scale is just another way of saying FB won't fund enough user support. And if FB won't fund it, it doesn't care about it.
"Scale comes with pain sometimes, sadly"
"Things happen"
it's 10pm, and i reported this problem a few hours ago - i probably either care about the problem, or i am nerding out on HN, or both.
Money doesn't define how i think of problems, if it decides yours, power be onto you.
Also it's clearly directed at me. Hard to spin it otherwise because it's using things i said
either whay you are saying sound more like a stereotype. I doubt you observed enough people in person to make a stereotype worthy conclusion.
Or rather: It’s value-based customer service. If the monetary value of fixing one user’s issue is less than the lifetime monetary value of keeping them as a user, then fixing it is a net loss and so it shouldn’t be fixed. When a user gets their issue on HN, the calculation changes.
That sounds wrong.
[1] rando number, large enough to brag about probably small enough to have easier support problem
It appears that's how the problem arose in the first place.
You’re the product! When the product is spoiled, you throw it away! Recovering spoiled product doesn’t do anyone a damn bit of good.
You are an optimistic person.
Big tech scum responds very quickly when it comes to legal issues.
> "Thank you to the 5 lovely people who work at Facebook and reached out using their personal email. My Facebook profile has been unlocked! This post had so many views via Hacker News (thanks to my husband for sharing there) [...]"
Which, in some sense, is an even bigger problem than the profile getting locked in the first place.
To use the analogy from the top comment here: it's like a monopoly power company cuts off electricity for individuals all the time on frivolous cause, but this is ok because very, very occasionally, you might post something at the "Forum for PowerNerds", and on the off-chance it gets high enough visibiliy, the nerds may manage to put some insider pressure and get the odd account reinstated.
No. Screw this. The more people turn to solar in disgust, the better.
Funny facts:
- the domain was registered at the same date as attack happened
- attack happened from Hamburg IP and Android phone. This data was in my reset email from FB. This was true when I stopped using FB 5+ years ago.
- domain registration costs money, hence success rate of such attacks should be rather high
- since I stopped renewing this domain, it was registered by one more entity. According to archive.org with just some ads.
Take care folks, remember about your expired domains.
They could unlikely profitably offer the level of support that would be needed to engage with users in a reasonable way.
Never forget that the user is not the customer on Facebook, they’re the sucker who is psychologically manipulated in whatever way possible to be addicted to the product and engage in ads.
Rather than just checking that the person can prove that they own the e-mail address, the standard should be that the person controls the e-mail address, and that e-mail address itself is under the control of the same domain owner as it was a the time it was registered.
This situation is really terrible for the author but at the same time I don't think Facebook did anything wrong initially; both can be true at the same time. Of course, Facebook should have a human revise their case (they probably won't do that) but Facebook shouldn't be liable for checking for expired domains. That's a responsibility you take on when you buy a domain and register accounts on it, and checking what accounts are registered where before letting the domain expire is the responsibility of the author.
The issue of who owns the email address is besides the point. The author can send a copy of their ID to Facebook, who can verify the data on the account before the takeover. She can probably even point out the exact date of the takeover by looking at when the domain was te-registered. The problem is that realistically, Facebook won't do any human checks and her account will be deleted by their version of Skynet because it wasn't built to handle honest mistakes like these.
Let people manage their account keys just like they manage their home or car keys.
The loss rate of those (especially car keys) is pretty high and losing them usually requires an expensive lock replacement. Is that what you were going for?
I'm not sure what else they could have done.
Instagram and WhatsApp are still very popular though. WhatsApp requiring a critical mass to make it endlessly compelling for users. Lots of the techy people i know tried to remove themselves from WhatsApp for signal but they've come back lately as its impractical due to poor adoption.
Would be interesting to know how their monetisation share between IG & FB is split in different regions. As much as I hate adverts in general i even find the IG ads useful from time to time; especially the hyperlocal targeting.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/
>Art. 16 GDPR Right to rectification
>1 The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.
>2 Taking into account the purposes of the processing, the data subject shall have the right to have incomplete personal data completed, including by means of providing a supplementary statement.
Adding people to an org, even one as big as Meta, is never a simple process.
NOTE: I don't have an account with Facebook, but the above gets around normal duplicate account checks.
I, too, had my Facebook account compromised last week.
My account of 15 years that I'd grown up with: a couple thousand friends I'd connected with travelling the world, 90% of my day-to-day comms, a decade and a half of photos and memories etc.
The part that hurts the most is that I've lost countless photos of and messages from my father who passed away a few years ago. Pretty heartbreaking.
To those who would mock me for being so invested in Facebook, I'd point out that I'm 27: that is to say that I entered my teenage years just as Facebook began to take off. In retrospect, it's obvious that Facebook is evil and doesn't give a shit about their users, but alas, at the time it wasn't so clear to 13 year old me (nor my peers) that we'd risk ending up in a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Interestingly, the only conclusion I can point to as to how my account was compromised is that my session data was somehow compromised, allowing the attackers to enter my account without having my password or access to my email which served as 2fa. Apparently Facebook auth related 0days are quite common due to their incentive to keep you logged in and their lackluster security.
In my case, they didn't change my password as they didn't have it, instead they were simply able to log in and add a secondary 2fa (a hardware key) which effectively locked me out so I couldn't declare something was wrong. Pretty smart.
From there, as I understand from my research, they immediately proceed to get your personal account banned so that you can't recover your Business Manager (advertising) account, which is what they're after. It looks like I was banned within 20 minutes or so of the attackers gaining access.
Worryingly, I've read that the way they get you banned so swiftly is through uploading CSAM/terrorist content, which results in an immediate ban and potentially a notification to law enforcement. I'm guessing this is why accounts are seldom recovered when attacked in this way.
On the support front, I've had a similarly frustrating experience trying to get help from Facebook — from searching here on HN and across various blogs & forums, there seem to be two methods of recourse:
1) The mysterious 'Oops' internal ticketing system at Facebook/Meta[1] for friends and family. This allows your case to be viewed by a real human, and from what I've read leads to it being restored within 24 hours.
2) You buy an Oculus and use the serial number to raise a ticket with Oculus support, which gives you the ability to submit evidence and have your case viewed by a team at Facebook (hopefully).
I own a Rift S, so I was able to go the 2nd route, but it's been close to a week now and I haven't seen any results nor had a response.
So yeah, it's pretty bleak. Despite my account being banned, the attackers are still setting up Facebook Ads. I get multiple emails every day that new ads have been approved for their scam stores. Salt in the wounds.
Note this article[2] I came across of a similar attack a couple of months ago. I reached out to the author on Twitter[3] to see if she'd had any luck with recovery, but alas she had not, despite raising several tickets at Facebook.
So, sadly it looks like we're fucked, although I'd be glad to be wrong.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employ...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2022/03/22/...
[3] https://twitter.com/TheCoppinger/status/1529685795270864896
That doesn't really checks out to me because to make any changes to 2fa in FB, you must provide your password first.
She fucked up and got hacked. Eat the humble pie, make a new account and start again.
You're assuming it is possible to make a new account. My son got banned from facebook for replacing his profile picture with an animal. He's tried a few times to make a new facebook account using his real name, each time to have the account flagged and banned within 10 minutes.
And there seems to be something about uploading a copy of your ID to verify the account. Since he has done that, the bans are tied to his ID.
I'm not saying my son is a computer wizard, but he has built his own machine and set up crypto mining. So not a total novice.
I really don't get why everyone here hates it.
Edit: Yes, I meant that login is tied to your wallet. This can be a hardware wallet, so it's very difficult to have it attacked, can be backed up, never expires, etc. This auth mechanism removes _tons_ of problems with existing web sites & giant corporations. But I guess most of you work for them, so have fun mocking people who are not like you :)
I think the 'web3' way would make it worse wouldn't it? like metamask relying on centeralized service to query the blockchain
I guess a real benifit I could see would be being able to use a blockchain to revoke your keys somehow but that's not how metamask and web3 stuff seems to work right now
The chrome extension to cryptography would help - but we have FIDO that does exactly that (and webauthn i guess).
The problem with using PK cryptography is that if you lose your keys, you'd be locked out.
Then we would probably have other key schemes M-of-N etc or social proof to compensate for the problems with single-key PK, which then has other problems.
The asym crypto is enough for proper authentication, but decentralized apps generally are built to use it, without relying on centralized data. A message signature being verified by a stateless service is all that is required
Could do without web3, but the practice of predatory web giants and smaller startups is to exploit the users so they don't do that
If your entire life (identity and finance) is gated by a single password, a user will Care more and that makes it easier to use and remember.
In other words, having your wallet behind the same password supports adoption.
Partly because comments like this.
All the web3 or crypto hate if you prefer is a very strong bias in this site. There are no real arguments, just that it is a scam or whatever. Is asymmetric crypto a scam? Is Leslie Lamport an idiot and nobody needs decentralized computing?
Please enlighten me
To the extent that web3 is even well defined, no it absolutely doesn't. The blockchain space right now is rife with scams and people getting stuff stolen from their wallets. At best it makes it harder for the average user to understand how to be secure and at worst it changes this scenario from "I lost my facebook account" to "I lost control of every asset I own and my entire identity".
https://fabricegrinda.com/hacked-cryptocurrencies-stolen/
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/11/godaddy-employees-used-i...
https://therecord.media/two-cryptocurrency-portals-are-exper...
https://cryptonews.com.au/godaddy-website-hack-leaves-defi-p...
https://news.bitcoin.com/hackers-compromise-web-portal-bitco...
https://www.engadget.com/2018-04-25-hackers-dns-phishing-sca...