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Comment by Jare | Hacker News Reader

Offtopic but here we go:

Once Threads became available in the EU I, like I assume many others, made an Instagram account from my FB account in order to check it out.

2 days later, and without having posted anything except perhaps a "Hello world", my Insta account was banned for generic reason (breaking the TOS, nothing concrete). I only found out 2 weeks later, as I hadn't even visited the site(s) again. Their "Appeal" button leads to a request to send a confirmation code to my phone, but no code ever arrives (Spanish phone, not a complicated country). There's no button or link to tell them that it doesn't.

I know of others who have experienced the same thing. Move fast and break things indeed.

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In trying to sign up for Threads, I was insta-banned when I created an Instagram account, without even having a chance to use it, for allegedly violating the ToS, which seems impossible, since I hadn't done anything yet.

They wanted to extract my phone number from me, and then also a photo/video after that to "verify" my identity, so I aborted the process, because I'm not going to feed the data slurping machine. I think that's the whole point of these fake bans, to extract personal data from you.

Twitter used to auto-ban me too in order to extract my phone number, and we know that Twitter illegitimately used phone numbers for advertising purposes.

To hell with the corporate-owned social networks. I want no part of them anymore. I'm sticking with Mastodon, which is free from this garbage.

Having worked at these large companies, I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional or silly versus nefarious. The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical and I would feel bad for that engineer working on that hypothetical feature haha.

> I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional

It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information.

On the other hand, it works in their favor, so there will not be any attempts at fixing this trigger-happiness either.

> The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans

The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical

Just like the privacy reviews that ultimately get them to continuously do things that are in breach of the GDPR and that even a layman with no specific legal/tech knowledge would consider creepy/unethical/illegal?

> I would feel bad for that engineer

That's the thing, there is no single engineer working on this. There is no ticket "increase the amount of personal information given by people" - as per my first point it would be a huge liability to put something like this in writing.

However, one engineer working on the ban system might have its KPIs tied to the amount of "bad" people blocked, where "bad" can be deemed as someone who got challenged and didn't subsequently complete or pass the additional verification (the thinking is that a legit user would have nothing to hide and complete the verification, and indeed many do). This effectively encourages ban trigger-happyness and indirectly increases data collection while being completely deniable.

Remember that these companies are not stupid/incompetent - there's lots of money at stake to get this "right" (in their own way - aka beneficial to their business model). They just have to pretend to be stupid/incompetent in order to get plausible deniability and deflect eventual litigation/regulation.

> It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information

How big is this conspiracy? Hundreds to thousands of engineers leave Meta every year, and 0 have blown the whistle on this. The actual FB whistleblower from 2023 didn't allege anything similar to what you're suggesting.

Another weird experience I had with this company is when I deactivated my FB account. A few months later a friend texted me and asked if I was going to an event. Apparently he had invited me to it on FB and FB didn't tell him my account is deactivated... So I never saw the invite and the system didn't tell him I didn't see it. I tested this with my wife, you still show up in invitable people and probably invite suggestions even when your account is deactivated. That makes no sense to me.

Out of curiosity, are you EU-based?

This is true for all Meta/Google/Twitter properties. No phone number results in a high chance of suspension irrespective of your usage.

It's a bot prevention measure (allegedly). It also conveniently blocks out people that are more likely to not want to share all of their personal information with them. No skin off my back, the less toxic social media garbage I'm allowed to use, the better for my sanity, good riddance.

TO BE FAIR (and I'm still on the fence how I feel about this)... the less personal information you share, the more bot-like you appear to be.

Meta/Google/etc... at the end of the day are businesses, and the currency they deal with when transacting with us is our personal information and they convert that to dollars with their partners.

As I also value freedom of association, I am perfectly alright with them refusing to "do business" with me because I do not find the denomination and terms of the transaction acceptable.

I do not really have any inclination to want to compel them to serve me by force of gun, either.

I think both they and myself are better off in this scenario where we just choose to not do business with each other and I find some other business that has more acceptable terms - or I just go without, these services aren't as essential as some people think.

But I did give them my phone number. I'm pretty sure they already had it from Facebook anyway, I've had a FB account for 15 years.

They just were unable to send the code to it, so I could not proceed with whatever appeal process they have in place. That said, if the next step was asking for my face, I'd have probably stopped right there like a poster said. They do have photos of me (Facebook) but it would just be too much.

Also, I constantly receive password reset codes to my email. I am not sure what scammers want to achieve, but it is annoying that Meta cannot do anything.

Message you friends and ask for emergency money.

How? They don't have access to my email.

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