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What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

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Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#11

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

krylon wrote: post #8

On the one hand, I cannot help but feel for this person - Facebook, without an explanation, did significant damage to this person's career. At least that's the way he paints it (though he mentions a rule in his mailbox that deleted mail from facebook automatically, so there might have been a warning and all that - we'll never know). On the other hand, well, that is precisely what some people warned us of - give a sin…

You can slightly mitigate this particular problem mentioned in the article (the author used it to manage FB pages): I always use at least 2 personal accounts for managing a FB page. One is actively used whereas the other one is just a backup in case something happens to the first one. Redundancy is always important, also in social media.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#12

Post by Jaruzel »

krylon wrote: post #8

On the one hand, I cannot help but feel for this person - Facebook, without an explanation, did significant damage to this person's career. At least that's the way he paints it (though he mentions a rule in his mailbox that deleted mail from facebook automatically, so there might have been a warning and all that - we'll never know). On the other hand, well, that is precisely what some people warned us of - give a sin…

> The only solution I can think of is for lots and lots of people to pool their money and start a non-profit Facebook.

See https://diasporafoundation.org/

Not that they've actually made any sort of dent in the problem - as you say, the network effect is just too strong.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#14

Post by mnm1 »

This applies to almost any online service including Amazon, Google, etc. Basically, these services are so unreliable and risky that using them for anything critical is dangerous. Even if you pay for them. They can and will shut down accounts for no reason. That is a risk people should be more aware of. Since the services are not dependable, it's a mistake to depend on them.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#15

Post by kolinko »

Jaruzel wrote: post #9

I know the article is old, but the author showed a severe lack of common sense. Facebook is NOT a backup. If you only keep stuff in your Facebook account, then it is as 'at risk' as if you only kept on the hard-drive of your ageing laptop that you bought on discount in Walmart/ASDA ten years ago. This oft quoted adage also applies: 'If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product'. The author seemed t…

In theory that's where consumer protection and antitrust laws should kick in.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#16

Post by tajen »

helloindia wrote: post #7

From my experience, it's nearly impossible to get help from Facebook/Instagram if what you need is not listed in their help page. I used to have two Insta accounts and two FB accounts(personal & professional). When Instagram released a new version to add multiple insta accounts, I did the mistake of adding my work account. But Insta was so buggy that it merged my imported FB friend list of both my Insta accounts. Thi…

Slack has a flawless multi-account implementation, which surprised me in this era where corporates try to aggressively create links between our accounts (import/suggest users, merge, or share the advertising ID). But, for example, if you do politically controversial activity on one Twitter account [1], I wouldn't add it in the multi-profile iPhone app: I would be too afraid of being banned from one and losing all accounts together, or the identity of all accounts be shared with law enforcement. I wonder what Chrome shares between multi-accounts profiles, but I have low trust in it for isolating data.

[1] I criticize my city's law enforcement, by filming where crime happens, where the police really is and the faults they do. I don't think it's illegal but I still wouldn't want my identity shared to them.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#17

Post by ggm »

The meta-lesson from this, is that hosted domains, services have to meet the AUP of the host, and your SLA with the host has to cover off on dispute or you are in a high risk situation. I have a personal domain hosted at google. I stand at risk of having them close the google account but retention of the domain is outside of that situation, I would need to be rejected by both google, and the dns registrar to lose all control of that personal domain (not impossible. not unlikely if google WAS my dns registrar). I might lose the data, but I can at least have continuity of service at my own risk levels if I do some basic minimum of holding copies off the domain or managing the state of the domain outside of google.

In facebook, this is just a lot harder. There is no outside. The tools to upload and manage content as a small enterprise are much less clear to me. What I've seen suggests most people treat it as the repo, and write into it as the repo, and operate in it. They don't upload to it from an external state or use an API.

But it would be true in AWS, in any hosted solution, in any space which you think is your space, but is actually a brand like myspace: if you don't own it, you run it under their terms and conditions.

Its a contract. you might not like it, but that 30 page ream of randomly mutating text T&C matters.

I've talked to people who got shut out. It sure hurts. I do not like to think what I would lose, should I fall into breach of my T&C or be detected as being in breach, and blackhole the notices.

My colleagues who do, or did work in google say that whilst it looks arbitrary, if you respect their mails of warning and commitment, if you reply in sequence through the hoops, you can survive being called out. If you dis-respect their sequence, or try to avoid hoops, you will suffer.

My experience with FB is similar, helping persians who suffered abuse of yahoo emails by opponents of their world view, marked as recovery accounts for facebook pages. If you do the right sequence (mutating) of things with FB, you can recover. But its not well documented at any specific point in time what that sequence is and you cannot easily get third parties to help you.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#18

Post by gizmo686 »

Jaruzel wrote: post #9

I know the article is old, but the author showed a severe lack of common sense. Facebook is NOT a backup. If you only keep stuff in your Facebook account, then it is as 'at risk' as if you only kept on the hard-drive of your ageing laptop that you bought on discount in Walmart/ASDA ten years ago. This oft quoted adage also applies: 'If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product'. The author seemed t…

There is another option. Consider sites like Facebook to be public accommodations, and create new laws regulating acceptable behavior of digital public accommodations.

Facebook is a significant part of our society. It is not clear why it should be free democratic oversight.

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#19

Post by tajen »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #11
krylon wrote: post #8

On the one hand, I cannot help but feel for this person - Facebook, without an explanation, did significant damage to this person's career. At least that's the way he paints it (though he mentions a rule in his mailbox that deleted mail from facebook automatically, so there might have been a warning and all that - we'll never know). On the other hand, well, that is precisely what some people warned us of - give a sin…

You can slightly mitigate this particular problem mentioned in the article (the author used it to manage FB pages): I always use at least 2 personal accounts for managing a FB page. One is actively used whereas the other one is just a backup in case something happens to the first one. Redundancy is always important, also in social media.

How did you create 2 fb accounts? Don't they ask for phone number confirmation?

Re: What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012)

#20

Post by tajen »

mnm1 wrote: post #14

This applies to almost any online service including Amazon, Google, etc. Basically, these services are so unreliable and risky that using them for anything critical is dangerous. Even if you pay for them. They can and will shut down accounts for no reason. That is a risk people should be more aware of. Since the services are not dependable, it's a mistake to depend on them.

I run my whole company on a Digital Ocean account. I'm frightened at the idea of the account being suddenly shut, for example if I miss a payment and the process had a bug.
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