My Reliance on Facebook is Dangerous
Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 29th, 2007 12:23 PMThis morning I discussed the rare instance of Facebook banning user accounts. I thought it was a relatively infrequent occurrence but according to Glenda Kwek this is a much more common occurrence. For those that suffer the wrath of Facebook, it can be devastating. Having your Facebook account shut down is a similar experience to losing a cell phone. Suddenly all of your accounts are sent to oblivion and aside from your close contacts, chances are you won’t remember everyone you had contacted.
Personally, my reliance on Facebook has grown exponentially. I now add business contacts and friends and frequently rely on Facebook for their contact information. Thanks to Facebook’s restrictions within the platform API, there is no way to access a user’s phone number or email address and hence no way to export their contact information to outlook or any other contact management software. While the best model is to avoid violating Facebook’s terms of service, if by some fluke your account is canceled, you will be screwed.
For the time being, all you can do is manually backup the contact information of your Facebook friends. This is going to have to change as Facebook’s user base grows and more complaints begin to surface of randomly disabled accounts. I can name at least one person who has had their account disabled; have you or any of your friends had their accounts disabled?
(4.64 out of 5)
(4.22 out of 5)
October 29th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
My account got banned back in August because of an FB bug and a misunderstanding. My colleague, David Ascher, blogged about it:
The most recent and spectacular challenge we had was when our marketing lead, an avid Facebook user, had built a Facebook group to communicate with a group of people who’d signed up to be our alpha testers. Due to apparent bugs in the group communication mechanisms, he tried to send them each a message to let them know that the app was live and that they should go ahead and start testing it. This promptly triggered a spam filter in facebook, and got his account banned. An appeal with customer service failed miserably (apparently they don’t seem to even review appeals), and it looked for a while like he had lost his personal Facebook account (with all its data) because he was trying to do his job as a Facebook application developer. Not good. Luckily, friendly folks on the #facebook IRC channel, including a Facebook employee, helped to get that resolved. It did drive home the point that we’ve all felt that there’s something problematic about the complete ownership of personal data by Facebook. That control, combined with a hair-trigger banning without warning and a probably overwhelmed appeals process, is scary.
To read the whole post, go to http://ascher.ca/blog/2007/08/17/a-facebook-story/
Some form of data backup will have to be created, otherwise FB will be more susceptible to the open social network movement. I’d be surprised if we don’t see something on this front in the next 3-6 months…
October 29th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Back when I first started my FB oriented company, I got banned from facebook 3 times in a timespan of 2 weeks.
It was intense to lose it all.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
My account got banned back in August because of an FB bug and a misunderstanding. My colleague, David Ascher, blogged about it:
The most recent and spectacular challenge we had was when our marketing lead, an avid Facebook user, had built a Facebook group to communicate with a group of people who’d signed up to be our alpha testers. Due to apparent bugs in the group communication mechanisms, he tried to send them each a message to let them know that the app was live and that they should go ahead and start testing it. This promptly triggered a spam filter in facebook, and got his account banned. An appeal with customer service failed miserably (apparently they don’t seem to even review appeals), and it looked for a while like he had lost his personal Facebook account (with all its data) because he was trying to do his job as a Facebook application developer. Not good. Luckily, friendly folks on the #facebook IRC channel, including a Facebook employee, helped to get that resolved. It did drive home the point that we’ve all felt that there’s something problematic about the complete ownership of personal data by Facebook. That control, combined with a hair-trigger banning without warning and a probably overwhelmed appeals process, is scary.
To read the whole post, go to http://ascher.ca/blog/2007/08/17/a-facebook-story/
Some form of data backup will have to be created, otherwise FB will be more susceptible to the open social network movement. I’d be surprised if we don’t see something on this front in the next 3-6 months…
October 29th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Back when I first started my FB oriented company, I got banned from facebook 3 times in a timespan of 2 weeks.
It was intense to lose it all.
October 29th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
My brother got booted twice (second one was permanent) for *emailing too often*.
Not spam, mind you, but emails to people he knows.
I am actually glad — because he needs to look for a job instead of flirting with chicks.
But on the second time he lost all his emails, friends, app history and other info permanently.
October 29th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
You have to be really careful if your business relies on someone else’s discretion, namely Facebook, Myspace or some such other portal. When Yahoo first released web sites, I built my company website and subsequent shopping cart on a Yahoo website, but as I learned over the course of the next few years, the site was frequently down and frequently buggy - which ended up in lost sales and customers. When Myspace came out a few years later, I created a business that relied on traffic from Myspace, and utilized the bulletins, comments and message options for marketing (not spamming). It became prohibitive, however, once Myspace implemented the Captcha bypass system, putting a series of bottlenecks in place that eliminated the potential of a small business like mine utilizing the platform for even the simplest of messages to customers.
Now Facebook. What is next? Will they implement Captcha or some such other system to slow spammers? It has potential to ruin so many other online businesses…I wonder if it’s worth it.
October 29th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
My brother got booted twice (second one was permanent) for *emailing too often*.
Not spam, mind you, but emails to people he knows.
I am actually glad — because he needs to look for a job instead of flirting with chicks.
But on the second time he lost all his emails, friends, app history and other info permanently.
October 29th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
You have to be really careful if your business relies on someone else’s discretion, namely Facebook, Myspace or some such other portal. When Yahoo first released web sites, I built my company website and subsequent shopping cart on a Yahoo website, but as I learned over the course of the next few years, the site was frequently down and frequently buggy - which ended up in lost sales and customers. When Myspace came out a few years later, I created a business that relied on traffic from Myspace, and utilized the bulletins, comments and message options for marketing (not spamming). It became prohibitive, however, once Myspace implemented the Captcha bypass system, putting a series of bottlenecks in place that eliminated the potential of a small business like mine utilizing the platform for even the simplest of messages to customers.
Now Facebook. What is next? Will they implement Captcha or some such other system to slow spammers? It has potential to ruin so many other online businesses…I wonder if it’s worth it.
October 30th, 2007 at 7:15 am
about 10 days ago an article appeared in a british tabloid about student from a posh school in the uk having set up a “dogging” group (dogging = having sex in public parking lots) as a JOKE. the school kicked out 2 students over it and the group was shut down by FB. AFAIK it doesnt exist anymore. some kid made a fake profile in the name of the headmaster of the school in question, that got shut down in a matter of days too. so i wonder if FB is chatting to this headmaster and doing whatever he asks? no laws were ever broken … info here. this amounts to censorship and lack of a GSOH - not cool!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reigate_Grammar_Sc...
October 30th, 2007 at 8:15 am
about 10 days ago an article appeared in a british tabloid about student from a posh school in the uk having set up a “dogging” group (dogging = having sex in public parking lots) as a JOKE. the school kicked out 2 students over it and the group was shut down by FB. AFAIK it doesnt exist anymore. some kid made a fake profile in the name of the headmaster of the school in question, that got shut down in a matter of days too. so i wonder if FB is chatting to this headmaster and doing whatever he asks? no laws were ever broken … info here. this amounts to censorship and lack of a GSOH - not cool!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reigate_Grammar_School
October 30th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Facebook and Microsoft… what excellent bedfellows.
FB’s a nice toy, but I’ll stick with Google, thanks.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Facebook and Microsoft… what excellent bedfellows.
FB’s a nice toy, but I’ll stick with Google, thanks.
October 30th, 2007 at 11:37 am
[...] Personally, I don’t want to mention the name of the employee given that I am now completely dependent on Facebook and I might risk having my profile shut down after being accused of a terms of service violation [...]
October 30th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
a friend of a friend got deleted for posting a pornographic picture to a group, dedicated to his friend, who is a porn star. go figure.
October 30th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
a friend of a friend got deleted for posting a pornographic picture to a group, dedicated to his friend, who is a porn star. go figure.
November 1st, 2007 at 10:59 am
[...] his Facebook account had been removed. Only a couple of days ago, I blogged about how dangerous my reliance on Facebook is given that I now have hundreds of contacts that I don’t have backed up information for. [...]
August 4th, 2008 at 10:21 am
My Facebook account was diabled yesterday and no one will reply to my requests for an explanation.
Alexandra Everist
Author of “A Katrina Moment”
August 4th, 2008 at 11:21 am
My Facebook account was diabled yesterday and no one will reply to my requests for an explanation.
Alexandra Everist
Author of “A Katrina Moment”
November 9th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
My account was disabled yesterday and all I was doing was post news updates on my own group for members to read.