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by ldrndll 2042 days ago
Careful. I opened a Facebook account to help my wife with administering FB ads for her business. Everything was fine, until I went through and locked down my privacy settings, and within 24 hours my account got suspended.I had to provide a phone number to unlock my account. Within a day or two it got suspended again. This time I had to upload a photo to unlock it. The cynic in me believes that this was just so that they had enough information to identify me and match me to my shadow profile.

Needless to say after that they declined to reinstate my account - without any recourse or right of reply - due to community policy violations. Given that my only contribution was managing ads - and my wife’s account remains unsuspended despite managing the same ads - I’m left drawing conclusions from my own anecdata that they very much don’t like having overly privacy focused accounts.
2 comments
dessant 2042 days ago
That is exactly what happened to my Facebook account, and it only got reinstated after this issue: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/30395

Though mine was probably locked solely because of the way I've metodically checked out every configuration option, and used Firefox with fingerprint protection enabled.

This whole ordeal made me realize that Facebook is sitting on personal data from possibly millions of profiles that are banned. I've read several reports about people logging in years after the account got suspended, and their personal data is still downloadable, but they are not offered further control of the data, such as deletion, which is illegal in the EU.

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akarma 2042 days ago
The most ridiculous part of Facebook’s anti-privacy crusade is that FB allows its employees to “lock their account,” making absolutely all information private / only visible to friends, even cover photos.

FB’s website claims the feature is “only available in some countries and on some devices,” but it’s BS, it’s actually an easy opt-in for employees.

It shows that FB understands the need for privacy, but only if you’ll help them spy on others.

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est31 2042 days ago
To be fair, from what I heard you need to have a facebook account in order to work there.
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akarma 2042 days ago
You do, but as the above commenter mentioned, you also need to have a Facebook account in order to be a customer of Facebook Ads, and for many other uses.

Purposely keeping that feature exclusive to employees shows that Facebook understands the desire for privacy, but only for those working for them.

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