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?
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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...
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It was intense to lose it all.
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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.
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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.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reigate_Grammar_Sc...
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FB's a nice toy, but I'll stick with Google, thanks.
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Alexandra Everist
Author of "A Katrina Moment"
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