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 insaniak wrote:
If it's been a while since you logged in, and scammers have been trying to access your account in the interim, it's not really that strange that they wanted to confirm you were actually you before giving you access to the account.

I would agree that asking for photo id is not the best way to go about that, and that photo id isn't something to trust to any social media site... but the idea behind it is reasonable.

It's a paradox: to secure my account I'm asked to do something fraught with security risks.

This is why other sites ask my first grade teacher, or first pet, or where I met my spouse - information that is meaningless trivia.

Anyway, it's best just to stay away from the place.

It's not really a paradox - your bank or such can also require more proof than a random pet name (often something you have to write down so you don't forget which "favourite pet" you chose or if you chose a name that wasn't actually your pet so someone can't hack into your account).

FB is just more "serious" about it than a forum which is happy for just a basic confirmation level of info.

 Overread wrote:
It's not really a paradox - your bank or such can also require more proof than a random pet name (often something you have to write down so you don't forget which "favourite pet" you chose or if you chose a name that wasn't actually your pet so someone can't hack into your account).

FB is just more "serious" about it than a forum which is happy for just a basic confirmation level of info.

The paradox is that you are electronically transmitting information that could be hacked either en route or once it reaches the source. Furthermore, my bank makes its money by reliably protecting my money; Facebook makes its money by selling all of the personal information it can get from me.

Basically, their business model is slow motion identity theft - everywhere you eat, sleep, your favorite foods, family, where you went to school - all of this is their commodity. There is very little incentive for them to protect my ID. I'm enough of a cynic to assume that half the "data breeches" are when the company decides that a year of "identity theft protection" is worth less than the data they are selling.

It should be deeply disturbing that deleting my Facebook account would have had an adverse effect on my military career.

Get out while you still can!

 insaniak wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
I think both are likely, but it was strange that facebook - the actual site, not an email - said that they needed to confirm my ID so could I kindly send them an image of my photo ID..

If it's been a while since you logged in, and scammers have been trying to access your account in the interim, it's not really that strange that they wanted to confirm you were actually you before giving you access to the account.

I would agree that asking for photo id is not the best way to go about that, and that photo id isn't something to trust to any social media site... but the idea behind it is reasonable.

This. . . Even for folks who are on daily, or very nearly so. I have a friend who got told by a mutual friend of an imposter account. Despite fairly frequent activity, they did need to prove that their account was the real account, and this was post-logging in to facebook, so not a fake site phishing for info. One of those things that could be used was a photo ID.

Yeah, I would trust my bank to protect my personal information more than I would trust social media sites or other businesses. I don't use AirBnB for the same reason... got up to the part of the account setup where they wanted me to upload pics of my driver's license, said 'Nope' and went with a different booking company instead.

The old 'mother's maiden name, etc' style questions are much less obtrusive, and much less risky... particularly because you don't have to use the actual, true information, just need to be able to produce the same answer you supplied originally.



On the facebook front, my current big bugbear is having stuff consistently not show up on my feed until 3 days after it was posted. The kids' school and the local community group frequently posts about things that are going on that day, and not seeing the post until 3 days later is more than a little useless.


And yes, the suggested pages are out of control. There are more ads and suggested pages in the news feed than content that I actually want to see.

Although at least the ads are more relevant than the constant stream of identical, bot-created ads for nonsense products on twitter. The frustration with FB ads is that there are so many obvious scammers that I no longer trust any of them. So they're just useless filler taking up space in the news feed.

Yeah my tax company asked for my driver's license to sign in.

And then told me I don't exist.

And then emailed me daily reminding me to log in.

I cannot believe Facebook is asking for that.

Bad enough Google wants a phone number to register an account these days.

Scammers (including the people who own Social Media companies) are making the internet almost unusable.

Install "FBP" (browser add-on).

Customisable filter for FB. Ads, suggestions, reels, even filter out specific post types. By image type or even keywords.

e.g. Don't like dog or baby pictures? You can tick those boxes and no longer see the posts that include them.

Haven't been on Facebook in years, not planning to go back either. Looks like I made theright decision.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I don't think that's FB fishing as I've had those emails and didn't require any ID or anything. It's more likely scammers trying to get into your FB by just hitting as many accounts as they can

I think both are likely, but it was strange that facebook - the actual site, not an email - said that they needed to confirm my ID so could I kindly send them an image of my photo ID.

The site makes its money from selling people's private information, and no other site asks me for that kind of stuff. At most they'll ping your phone and email of record. Actually saying "hey, photograph your gov't ID and send it to us! We're totes trusthworthy" is weird.

There is a guy I follow on youtube that calls himself the Mechanical Ninjaneer. He has a facebook account under that name also, as that's how a majority of his followers know him. One of his episodes was literally him fighting with facebook because they locked him out of his account for "using a fake name" and they need an ID with his name on it to allow him access. So, he just fabricated his own ID. It was just some random background of a map of Arizona, a picture he took of himself, random numbers for the "ID", his name listed as "Mechanical Ninjaneer", and the words "Official Arizona Identification" across the bottom. He scanned it, sent it in, and they accepted it, no problem.

I wonder if he started a service making fake, fake IDs, that would be a crime or not?

I'm glad I've avoided all those anti social sites. I've never used them and never seen the need or had the interest in them to do so.
None of my kids, I use that loosely as they're all adults, use them either. They all have horror stories of people that they know that have harmed themselves, killed themselves or had horrible reactions on something they posted.
I don't understand in this time of fairly common identity theft why people post all of what their doing online. They make themselves targets.
Anti social media it is as there's nothing sociable about it.

In an age when nobody writes letters anymore, Facebook was a handy tool for keeping up with what the people you know but don't see every day are up to with their lives. It was also handy for reconnecting with people you had lost contact with over the years, as so many people were using it. It was very definitely 'social' media.

The change came when they introduced advertising. From there, the focus became making money for advertisers rather than keeping the platform user friendly and functional for its original purpose.

someone on the internet ask you to send them your full name, address, passport, credit card, and phone number so they can verify that you are "real" and not a scammer, while promise to keep those information save and only sell them anonymously if you pay them

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
This is course a perfect example of “engakification”. Which is a proper word now.

What used to be a fun and useful way to keep up with friends and family, is now a corporate hellhole devoted solely to making a ridiculously wealthy man even wealthier.

We’re kind of seeing the same thing with Streaming. Amazon now carries ads (nowt too annoying thus far, but if it could figure out I Don’t Care About Sport, that’d be great), and prices are only going up, ads or not.

Once I learned of that concept I saw it everywhere I looked online. FB, amazon, google.. all used to be world class experiences, and are now basically just flea markets.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Seeing as they've updated their algorithm again, and again I'm subjected to god awful ads inside my feed, there's yet another thing to gripe about:

If you go in to ad settings, the page simply does not load. Like, it just isn't programmed to do anything. So, it used to be, you could click a couple buttons and say "never show me this advertiser again" but now. . . blank screen.

You know what really pisses me off?

I kinda fancy that I know more about UK financial products than most Dakkanauts. And I know which products are regulated, and which aren’t.

And if it’s not regulated, it can’t be recommended to anyone except experienced investors.

Now. What makes one an experienced investor? It genuinely depends. And part of that “depends” is one’s liquidity and overall situation.

If you’re like me and you do pretty alright? Low risk,low reward investments are best suited. You won’t become a squillionaire overnight. But you’re never gonna lose more than your original stake.

£10, £100, £1,000 in? That’s it. That’s your potential loss.

But crap like Crypto and CFD? Those are complex. And with some? You can risk more than your stake.

It’s those that can’t be advertised. Ever. At all.

Yet…..FB? “Oh we am the Speshul case”. And I’ve seen far, far too many cases cross my desk where some poor dobber had been swindled. I’ve even written to my then MP about it.

His answer, the wording I can’t quite remember is that social media platforms argue they’re somehow not included in advertising laws.

But…hey. Keeps me a job. Just sucks to be the poor devils that fall for it and lose their life savings. Or worse.

Facebook is basically a TV station or newspaper where we provide the content.

It should totally be covered by existing advertising laws.

Damn straight they should be.

Too many folk being fleeced because of Social Media.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


His answer, the wording I can’t quite remember is that social media platforms argue they’re somehow not included in advertising laws.

But…hey. Keeps me a job. Just sucks to be the poor devils that fall for it and lose their life savings. Or worse.

I mean, when a post has a nice little print right with it reading "sponsored ad" how tf is it NOT covered under any advertising laws?

Sounds like that former MP had some green lined pockets (or. . . whatever color a pound is) going on.

Quite possibly.

But the harm the lack of effort in holding social media to the same laws as other media is immeasurable.

And sadly, it’s not just financial. If you’re a Snake Oil Salesman? Social Media is your oyster.

It's strange how many people still don't remember and use the Golden Rule for buying and investing: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

On that? How many of us receive any kind of financial education?

Anyways, that’s somewhat political so crashing on.

Facebook is now hosting ads featuring Hard Core Prawn. Not the simply suggestive. Proper “giving her six nowt” Prawn. And when I report it as inappropriate? Apparently it’s not against their rules.

It is, report them.

What I see are replies in old threads tagging everyone with a pr0n vid.

Report, report, report.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Damn straight they should be.

Too many folk being fleeced because of Social Media.

FB?

Have you taken a look at youtube recently and their adds on financial products, blatantly fakeed videogame ads and just simply scams?

Honestly? Not paid that close attention.

I normally have YouTube premium, so just don’t get the ads. But having been Bill Bombed this month I’m starting to see ads. Just not that one. Or those ones.

X is a cesspit, but at least ridiculous video game ads get community notes.

Twitter's thing of having community notes instead of content moderation is not really a bonus. You still see the dross in the feed.

Which, now that I think of it, would be a fantastic idea - they need to add a toggle to set the feed to not display anything with a community note on it unless you have interacted with it...

Blocking the ads on X seems to work reasonably well, so at least you only see them briefly.

 insaniak wrote:
Twitter's thing of having community notes instead of content moderation is not really a bonus. You still see the dross in the feed.

Which, now that I think of it, would be a fantastic idea - they need to add a toggle to set the feed to not display anything with a community note on it unless you have interacted with it...

Isn't that 99+% of X these days? May as well just leave the site.