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Facebook Notification Spam Has Crossed the Line (wired.com)
Facebook has always nudged truant users back to its platform though emails and notifications. But recently, those prods have evolved beyond comments related to activity on your own profile. From a report: Now Facebook will nag you when an acquaintance comments on someone else's photo, or when a distant family member updates their status. The spamming has even extended to those who sign up for two-factor authentication -- which is a great way to turn people off to that extra layer of security. "The part of it that bugs me is that two-factor authentication is something [Facebook] should be encouraging people to use, but instead the way this is working here is that they're driving people away from two-factor and making people less secure," says Matt Green, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, who has done contracted security work for Facebook in the past.
"It's abusive, people's attention is deliberately tweaked by what looks like a two-factor authentication message." Green says he's received near-daily SMS messages from Facebook since January alerting him that one of his friends performed some action on the platform. Before he started receiving the messages, Green says he hadn't logged into Facebook for a long time and had actually forgotten his password. The weirdest part about the SMS notifications is what happens if you reply to them. If you respond, your message is posted to your own profile. Further reading: Facebook Really Wants You To Come Back, Facebook Is Spamming Users Via Their 2FA Phone Numbers, and Facebook Makes Moves On Instagram's Users.
"It's abusive, people's attention is deliberately tweaked by what looks like a two-factor authentication message." Green says he's received near-daily SMS messages from Facebook since January alerting him that one of his friends performed some action on the platform. Before he started receiving the messages, Green says he hadn't logged into Facebook for a long time and had actually forgotten his password. The weirdest part about the SMS notifications is what happens if you reply to them. If you respond, your message is posted to your own profile. Further reading: Facebook Really Wants You To Come Back, Facebook Is Spamming Users Via Their 2FA Phone Numbers, and Facebook Makes Moves On Instagram's Users.
"Then turn off SMS messaging you moron"
Read and comprehend the next sentence of the summary, where it is EXPLICITLY stated "Before he started receiving the messages, Green says he hadn't logged into Facebook for a long time and had actually forgotten his password."
Only moron I see here is you. He's a professor at John Hopkins, what are your credentials?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
All he had to do was reply with a text with "Stop" in the body to disable the SMS service. Pretty much every single SMS subscription service supports this and other similar commands to a normal text console. Sending a message of "Help" will list this and various other commands. This was figured out from a quick 5 second Google search. There is no need to even log into the account to disable these notifications.
Exactly. 2FA is just there so they can get your mobile number. Gmail does this too (actually every "free cloud service" does now).