Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Someone has stolen my Instagram account

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 351 posts

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#191

Post by zamadatix »

nabla9 wrote: post #138
Kapura wrote: post #16

I think this is indicative of the biggest problem we have had with social media: there is no legalism here, just "codes of conduct" that companies and users both willfully ignore. If your handle gets sold by some facebook employee to a rich kid in LA, what recourse do you have? I don't know what laws this would break (maybe some broad definition of fraud? I Am Not A Lawyer) so it's not like this person has a slam dun…

If the new owner is imposter trying to be the old owner, it would be identity theft and fraud. If it's just giving the handle to someone else there is nothing. If you don't pay for a account, you don't usually own it unless there is something I'm missing. If you want to own your identity in the internet, get a website you own and don't rely on shady social-media networks that give you something free.

It's remarkably hard to actually "own" anything on the internet. The act of paying for something or not does not dictate what's your property - ASNs are leased, IPs are leased, domains are leased, connections are leased and you'll need to either pay or use someone else's to host something on the internet. The closest you could come is legacy IPv4 space and not rely on traditional infrastructure such as DNS.

Most registrars have decent trademark policies but again it's the internet. Just because you have a trademark in your country doesn't mean someone else doesn't elsewhere or that the registrar is going to care 5 years from now when the ToS change on renewal.

If you want to be securely verifiable on the internet you're better off being searchable and signing your content. The hard part is finding people that care enough to verify who you are in a decentralized manner for that to matter though.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#192

Post by toyg »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #164
some1else wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a screencap of Philip Kaplan's newsletter from 2017 where he claims a friend at Instagram helped him get @DistroKid, which was registered but inactive: https://i.imgur.com/9mNY7lJ.png

That's not necessarily evidence of rogue employees being able to steal accounts for their friends. That may just mean that they had a friend at Instagram that helped them trigger the official process to delete an inactive account and give the name to someone who plans to use it.

In practice, it's the same thing: you have no way to know that this is not what happened to @danny, the consequences are the same.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#193

Post by heavyset_go »

Nextgrid wrote: post #100
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is anyone really going to risk their cushy FAANG job to give their buddy a cool handle? Possible, but seems far fetched. Given the kind of ethically vacuous tech-bro who might join FB in 2020? Not _that_ far-fetched.

Ethically vacuous doesn't mean stupid though, and I doubt they will jeopardize a lucrative career for a quick buck or bragging rights in front of their friends.

People do this all of the time, and there is nothing about jumping through Facebook interview hoops that prevents people from making immoral decisions for personal gain once they're an employee.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#194

Post by nkozyra »

lightgreen wrote: post #172
antihero wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When will people learn that capitalism literally doesn't give a shit about people.

Capitalism is an economic and political system. An economic and political system technically literally cannot care about people, same way as temperature, gravity, philosophy or history cannot care about people.

This is an extremely reductive. Temperature or gravity are not composed of people, who have the ability to make change within the system they comprise.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#195

Post by toonarmybarmy »

JanNash wrote: post #173
polynomial wrote: post #133

It appears to have reverted back to the originally Danny? (6 posts, not 100, 5,563 followers, 6 posts, set to private) https://www.instagram.com/danny/

I’ve asked danny on Twitter if he can confirm this.

It hasn't. Although a product designer at FB has got involved. https://twitter.com/diegojimenez/status/1310266030388846595?...

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#196

Post by beshrkayali »

Regardless of the technical aspect if this is possible or not (I like how a random commenter here claiming he’s from Instagram is asking people not to trust a random tweet with a screenshot), I don’t see the problem as some suggested with the lack of regulation in social media. The issue is really in the blind trust people have put in these companies. Losing the username is one thing, but losing access to messages and potential private images on there is the actual pain, maybe not for this guy specifically but fun general. Having your private conversation on these platforms, your entire business or a huge portion of your marketing, or as a main way to “connect” with others is the problem, it’s like leaving your door and windows open for a week and then being surprised that your house got robbed. It might not happen, but it’s a huge risk. The solution is easy: don’t entirely depend on these platforms and don’t store valuable data there.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#197

Post by verroq »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #129
ipsum2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but it sounds like the issue was resolved (correctly or incorrectly) the first time, so the user started filing a ton of issues, which were automatically marked as duplicate. Now he's spamming the white hat security form ( https://twitter.com/dannyjhall/status/1310231761444581385 ), which is not likely to get him a response.

“Spamming?” If repeated complaints about an issue the company won’t resolve is what we call spam now, I’m speechless.

He is a “free” user, what duty does Facebook owe him?

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#198

Post by biztos »

Nextgrid wrote: post #100
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is anyone really going to risk their cushy FAANG job to give their buddy a cool handle? Possible, but seems far fetched. Given the kind of ethically vacuous tech-bro who might join FB in 2020? Not _that_ far-fetched.

Ethically vacuous doesn't mean stupid though, and I doubt they will jeopardize a lucrative career for a quick buck or bragging rights in front of their friends.

Except if they're sure they won't be caught.

Isn't that how actual crime works?

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#199

Post by tinus_hn »

hobby-coder-guy wrote: post #22
deft wrote: post #3

This is a very common thing. In fact influencers and FB employees publicly and loudly talk about this method and no one stops them. "Hey I'm visiting fb headquarters anyone want a new @ or a checkmark?" Why do random fb employees even have this capability?

Source?

This is not Wikipedia

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#200

Post by smt88 »

renewiltord wrote: post #120
WORLD_ENDS_SOON wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting aspect to this story is that although there's no real evidence that a Facebook employee was involved, it still seems like a believable explanation to many readers including many commenters here. If a company's customer support is so bad that no one can tell the difference between being hacked and being abused by a rogue employee, does it actually matter what happened? I guess that it matters to the ori…

Users here will believe any conspiracy theory so that's not really a high bar. I'm serious. There was that massive 2000 comment thread the other month about some big company doing something evil and then it turned out they didn't do it. Everyone who was right and informed in the original thread was greyed out by users here.

My anecdata says that HN users are among the least likely on social media to believe conspiracy theories. They actually tend to err on the side of skepticism. It's very common to see someone say, "Yes, this could be malice, but it could also be incompetence."

I think this is partly because so many of us have worked in (or with) the targets of most conspiracy theories: government and large corporations.

Post reply on HN