In July someone broke into my Facebook account. It wasn’t anything I did. I never give out passwords, respond to phishing, or leave anything unsecured, because I know these things happen. Facebook itself got hacked most probably, and my password was stolen by some goblin in order to steal any financial information that might have been in my account. Of course there wasn’t any, so it was a pointless exercise. The other scenario is that Facebook itself did it to “cancel me”. I don’t really know. Facebook will alert you when someone changes something in your account, and they will send an email asking if it was you. If you don’t respond because it was you, they leave it at that. Unfortunately if you don’t respond because you didn’t see the alert immediately, the hacker can change everything including the alert email address and password, so you’re locked out of your account for good. You’ll just see four alerts that you didn’t respond to, and by then some asshole has locked you out. It’s a completely shitty system, which is set up to fail.
If you try and get back in, you have to prove who you are by uploading some id. Since the information on my account has nothing to do with my actual id (I didn’t provide that when I opened the account almost 20 years ago, because of the very good possibility that it could be hacked…which turned out to be true!) the id I upload won’t be identifiable as me. It’s scanned by a robot I’m sure. There isn’t any way you can interact with a person.
Here is the key point in all of this ..Since I responded to the very first alert that it wasn’t me who changed my password, EVERY CHANGE THAT WAS MADE TO MY ACCOUNT SUBSEQUENT TO THAT, IS NULL AND VOID!!!!! They know this and I know this. They DON’T NEED MY FUCKING PASSPORT!!!
It’s a very unhelpful help center, but Facebook doesn’t really care. They have 3 billion accounts, they don’t need you. It doesn’t really matter to me in the long run, except that the Slaughtermen and Ian Stephen (me) had long standing pages with quite a few followers, and although they are still up, I can’t reply to messages or post anything. I can’t see what people I know in Australia are doing now either, and I can’t post videos or information about what I’m doing to the same people. Furthermore, I can’t let anyone know why I suddenly disappeared. It has made me realize the insidiousness of privately operated social media, which is something I already knew, but it also made me realize that it’s a flawed system, because internet access to friends and family is controlled by these nasty people who can’t even run a secure platform.
As of mid August, I can still see my login profile and there are 25 notifications. I can’t log in though to view them, because FACEBOOK won’t send me a link to change my password, even though they are fully aware that I didn’t change it, or anything else on there. Why would I? If there was some way I could sue them for this aggravation I would. They are demanding highly sensitive ID such as a driver’s licence or a passport to “prove who I am”. This is egregious corporate abuse as far as I’m concerned. It has got to stop.