Hacker News Reader

I don't think you can assume your identity was compromised. I know the Facebook denial dialog suggests that "unusual activity" was detected and you need to access it via your mobile device. Of course as you know that doesn't help.

I signed on for Meta enhanced support for a month (nb, don't bother doing this, it's a waste of money) and had numerous voice calls with pandering support people who assured me it had nothing to do with identity and everything to do with vague "Community Standards violations" that can't be identified. FWIW the restrictions are indefinite and can't be appealed.

FB is set up like it's based on the film "Brazil" mated with Sartre's "No Exit."

I do strange things, so it's possible that the cause has to do with some quirk of my behavior while closing the account in 2011, or while attempting to reopen it in 2026, and not somebody else's behavior in the interim.

I don't really care about facebook, I found a buyer for the thing. I'm just saying that the use of biometrics is bad engineering because it amplifies the severity of adjacent bugs to "blocker". Starting over with a new identity should be painful enough to discourage bad behavior, but it should be possible to enable users who do strange things sometimes to navigate the system.

> Meta enhanced support

I’m sorry am I reading this right? You now have to pay for the privilege of getting support so you can participate in Zuck’s infostealer so that he can then sell your data and make money off it? I think I’m getting too old for tech.

Yes, you read it right. I wrote inelegantly though. There is no actual support provided by the "enhanced support." It's a scam.

Meta Verified, right? AFAIK this does actually work with Google. If you pay them some fee you can actually get support

They supplied me with false and misleading information. I'd not call the deceptive and utterly useless talk I got from Meta Verified "support." YMMV

"hell is other people's social media posts"

I tried to make an account while forgetting my VPN was engaged. Another US IP address but one from a block of IPs I’m sure is used for nefarious purposes. So because I briefly shared an IP block with ne’erdowells, I am, without an option to appeal, banned from interacting with Facebook forever.

Google Ads is ghosting me too. I really could get behind legislation that requires companies to have a human point of contact in these cases, but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want as customers.

    but I guess a private company has the right to ignore people they don’t want
    as customers.

The problem is the monopolistic power these companies have.

This is what the EU has: https://www.eu-digital-services-act.com/Digital_Services_Act...

I made an account on LinkedIn while forgetting my VPN was enabled and set up my profile. They immediately flagged me as suspicious and restricted my account, and demanded I upload an ID to remove the restriction, to which I complied and they lifted the restriction. Then about a month later I tried to add my sibling as a connection and they didn't get any notification, then my sibling tried to search up my name to add me and I wasn't showing as a search result. Seems I was shadowbanned even after providing my ID, which seems insane to me that the main professional social network can just do that to someone without due process or any indication. This type of thing could sabotage someone's entire professional career or ruin their self-confidence as everyone ignores all of their messages and activity

I have the same problem with my actual residential ISP. You wouldn't think sites like Etsy would ban entire IPs, but they apparently have; can't view the site at all, just a generic "you are blocked" message.

At least half the sites I try to visit are endless captcha loops, mostly from cloudflare. Trying to make online orders with a credit card often gets the order automatically flagged or canceled. Many sites give a generic cloudflare "you are blocked" message, when I've never visited them before.

I recently tried to download some manuals from the RICOH website, and all four different residential ISPs I tried from were blocked, and these were family members' connections that aren't part of any sort of proxy botnet or similar.

Meta, obviously the same company, has four separate pages that handle the creation of a “page” for a business.

They all prompt for the same information to do the same job.

You are required to make one of these “pages” to be able to advertise on any Meta property.

None of them work, and they have non-functional error handling. And if you keep trying, getting zero feedback about what’s wrong, you get the “scan your face and give us your biometric data” wall.

As such I cannot advertise on Instagram. Like, I can’t give them money, even when I try. It’s impossible that I’m the only one in the world, and it’s costing them money. Directly.

You would think that with their infinite AI resources they would be able to recognize problems, identify the source, and unfuck themselves… right?

In days, not years… right?

At least that’s what we’re told. But it seems reality doesn’t quite agree.

It's actually real that a ton of businesses must resort to shady providers of "Ads account" for legitimate stuff, nowadays it's very hard to join Facebook, if you didn't have an account made the past years, it's likely that you can't signup and run your business on it, you have to use illegal methods.

What illegal methods work? I'd like to post again (non-commercially)

I bought my last car on Craigslist. It was quite pleasant and I like the car. Not that there isn't garbage/scams there, but there's garbage on marketplace too (more, to my eye). I make a point to always go to Craigslist first. It still exists, and it's kicking!

OfferUp also has a ton, as does AutoTempest and even good old fashioned AutoTrader. I'm currently shopping for my son.

Facebook seems to have the lowest cost cars, but it also seems to be the least successful way of contacting people. When I bought a car for my sister in April, I contacted (no exaggeration) 70+ sellers and heard back from about ten of them. And yes, I changed the default "Is it still available?" message to something demonstrating urgency e.g. "I have cash and would like to buy." But with persistence, I found her the right car through Marketplace. Really hate the FBook search interface though, it's total garbage.

I spend most of my time looking on CList and OfferUp.

> I'm currently shopping for my son.

Same! I recommend an old (2017-) Nissan Leaf. I got one for very cheap when gas was at a local peak, and now that's it's going down, I'm seeing even better deals. The low range can be a plus when it's a 16-year-old driver whom you have no interest in seeing drive out of the city. haha

I had the exact same experience. Never used Facebook. Wanted to create a page for a product. Suspended. Did the face scan. Now they have my face and I'm still suspended. Absolute joke. Zuckerberg can go suck a fat one.

I had the same thing, tried to set up an instagram account for a website I run. It locked me out instantly and asked for a face photo; after I uploaded it it went to review; after about 40 minutes that brand new instagram account was permanently suspended for posting content which breaches the terms of service, with no appeal possible. It did let me download the full account data which of course had nothing in it and no further info about why it got permabanned.

It is obvious something is broken but they are quite good at blocking you from accessing any possible avenue of support once the account is in this state.

On the off chance someone from Meta is reading: Please unban the account "rareboc" :-)

It should also be noted Facebook does nothing in good faith because Zuckerberg's core personality is what it is

It isn't that biometrics might never make sense but when it comes to Facebook? He's a black hat hacker who deserves prison

To the downvoter: please note Facebook used email passwords. Zuckerberg hacked Crimson reporters who were investigating him circa 2003. I mean what I said. Why do you have the 500 karma necessary to do that?

At the very least, we need to outlaw the method of corporate governance that Meta (and increasingly, other tech companies) use.

Mark has an absolute majority of shares at Meta at around 61% [0]. It is literally impossible for the board or other shareholders to cause him to do anything he doesn't want to do or to make him work in the best interests of others, whether they be other shareholders or the public. Meta is more-or-less a sole proprietorship with window dressing.

If no one can force a company to change by anything short of a person's passing or their loss of interest, then it's not really governed, and cannot be trusted to operate within the market and society at large. We need to make these organizations accountable to others in the systems in which they participate.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-...

Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.

There are cases where it's sufficient to find a leader with sufficient moral fiber to resist corruption, but I don't think this is one of them.

Zuck was a scumbag to start with, but being the kind of admin that gets to jerk people around on the basis of their biology is a corrupting kind of power. Even a well meaning individual, given a few decades at the helm of a company based around treating user's faces like they're the company's intellectual property, would have become a scumbag by now.

Maybe biometrics as a convenience, where they don't leave the device they're captured on and are secondary to some other credential which the user can change, are alright. But any central registry of people's body parts is gonna be a short cut to bad juju. It's an architecture we should work to prevent because it'll create Zuck-a-likes.

Yeah that's totally fair. I just meant that the way Meta does it, like... oh oops, sorry, we've suspended your account. Give us your face to regain access to your friends (which they'd already previously taken away, granted this is 14 years ago or 15 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433)

When a xiaomi 15 phone asks to scan your face for phone unlock, it specifically warns that a photo of you may be sufficient to unlock the phone. Not sure how it works with other brands/models, but i don’t think the way they are doing face verification is the right way to do it

Apple's devices use an IR depth scanner, not the camera, and do not expose the data to software.

I'd push back on your theory that the problem is your biometrics having been abused by a third party (rather than merely being abused by Faceboot...). I'd say the base incentive is that they really don't care about adding new users, so their false positive rate is set way too high. They think you need them more than they need you. And for Faceboot Marketplace they're probably right (about 3-4x the selection of Craigslist IME, and a corresponding difference in interested buyers). I'll still browse and post things on Craigslist, and when I see something for sale on both I'll respond with the Craigslist method to support its mindshare (also straightforward email/SMS is a heck of a lot easier than having to use Faceboot Messenger and then nudge the conversation over to SMS for the actual meetup).

That happened to me to! A similar moment of weakness: I got tired of being locked out of like half of small business profiles. A local brewery (very small brewery, but top tier beers) posts on instagram if they’ll even be open that day.

Caved, tried to sign up, asked for my face, then rejected me forever.

Same thing happened to me. Except I created a new Facebook account using my work email. I had to use my personal Facebook account. Meta has become so awful.

> Meta has become so awful.

It’s been a while already, and they started from pretty unethical so it’s not like it was ever great.

we programmatically created a system with implicit trust and now that trust is washing away. business logic should probably be guaranteed and have to pass a series of tests in order to provide expected service

Hmm, that also happened to me. Scan face, account lost forever?