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.

Comments

Secure?

[110010001000]

Why should Facebook be "secure"? I don't get it. You are giving all your data away. The idea is to make it frictionless and make it easier to login so you will give more data away. I doubt Facebook corporations wants to make it HARDER to log in.

Re:Secure?

[doconnor]

They don't want some hacker to hijack your account and start generating inaccurate data.

Re:Secure?

[sjames]

I doubt they care all that much, but they need to convince their buyers that the data is accurate.

Facebook is a cancer

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Lol, when will you learn that Facebook doesn't give a shit about its users.

What a maroon

[DerekLyons]

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.

Then turn off SMS messaging you moron. It's not Facebook's fault that you're an idiot, nor that you're an idiot looking for your fifteen minutes.

Re:What a maroon

[darkain]

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.

It's outright lying is what it is doing

[Khyber]

On my FB business page, I keep getting notifications of likes on my posts - I don't HAVE any posts yet, just store items, and none of those have any likes on them. The notification also doesn't tell you who liked the post like it should.

FB is flat-out lying to get people to use its platform, and this should count as false advertisement.