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Facebook Really Wants You To Come Back (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The social network is getting aggressive with people who don't log in often, working to keep up its engagement numbers, Bloomberg reports. Sample this for instance: It's been about a year since Rishi Gorantala deleted the Facebook app from his phone, and the company has only gotten more aggressive in its emails to win him back. The social network started out by alerting him every few days about friends that had posted photos or made comments -- each time inviting him to click a link and view the activity on Facebook. He rarely did. Then, about once a week in September, he started to get prompts from a Facebook security customer-service address. "It looks like you're having trouble logging into Facebook," the emails would say. "Just click the button below and we'll log you in. If you weren't trying to log in, let us know." He wasn't trying. But he doesn't think anybody else was, either. "The content of mail they send is essentially trying to trick you," said Gorantala, 35, who lives in Chile. "Like someone tried to access my account so I should go and log in."
Dear Facebook,
That wasn't me trying to log in. Better delete the account right now, lest you have some fake profiles again. Better safe than sorry, delete it NOW, NOW, NOW!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I was shocked that when I received one of these facebook emails, that clicking on the link didn't prompt me for a login password. It took me straight into the account with zero authentication. I hadn't logged in in several years, so there were no cookies or anything local. Would not be hard to trawl for these and take over a lot of accounts?
This isn't new practice on Facebook's part. They pulled a similar pattern of mails on me when I quit using it back in 2007. I'm surprised no one else has made this comment. When I complained about this to tech industry contacts back then, I was treated like I was wearing a tinfoil hat, but now some user experiences the same thing and an article gets written for a major news outlet. If you apply the rule that fear sells news, I guess this means that people are finally starting to be afraid of what they are "sharing" on voluntary surveillance media. Whoops, I mean, social media. Sorry.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
It was fairly easy for me. I changed my real name to my initials. They had a real name only policy (not sure if they still do) so they banned my account for using a fake name. I haven't received an email from them since.
Not very likely in this case. Advertisement companies like Facebook have no real product and are easy to replace once they're gone.
Confirmed. My name was changed to Jus D'Orange because I got bored. Years later they bust me for it. Require me to change my name before I can log in again. Bam: "Jus de Pomme". Week later banned and now need to upload a government issued ID to confirm my name.... oh hell no.
Only problem is: I can't log in to be able to delete my account. I'm sure that password will get breached eventually (not sure if I can even change it in the current state), but the ID requirement will be there protecting my account.
Terms of service say I can't create a new account to circumvent a ban so yeah
I have a similar problem with MySpace. I want to delete all my stuff (and maybe try to delete my account if it's an option) but whenever I try to log in, it won't let me proceed unless I agree to new ToS. I want out but I can't say No without saying Yes first.
Web users who have never signed up for Facebook, such as myself, still have a shadow profile that Facebook infers from two kinds of data source. One is information that Facebook members provide to Facebook about a non-member, such as contacts on their phones and tags in photos. The other is a click-stream, or the sequence of URLs of documents loaded in a non-member's browser that contain Facebook analytic devices, such as its like button or comments plug-in.