2 ms·

My account is deactivated now, but once upon a time I was an active FB user. I did not tell Facebook my birthday. However, friends who knew me would still post

My account is deactivated now, but once upon a time I was an active FB user. I did not tell Facebook my birthday. However, friends who knew me would still post Happy Birthday messages on my birthday, and FB would auto-populate my birthday as a result. So I would go in every year and delete my birthday again. Then they stopped allowing me to clear it out. Since people--without prompting--had wished me a happy birthday, FB was sure it was my birthday, and that was that. I could leave the year blank, but the month and day were literally unmodifiable. That's when I started clearing all the personal data out of FB I could. No likes, no group memberships, nobody allowed to "check me in," and so on. They were collecting data on me I had no provided, against my expressed will.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Yea good example of how network effects really work. In this case your network opted in to Facebook and opted your data in - so again "guilty by association."
kodt 9y ago
I had a fake name on my account, but all of my real life friends knew what my name on Facebook was. I liked this system as it allowed me to connect with my friends without worrying too much about my name and data being out there. Eventually Facebook said I had an invalid name and needed to change it. So I tried changing it to another fake name, which was rejected. I tried several more, including perfectly normal names and all were rejected. Not even abbreviations were accepted, it had to be my full exact name. Facebook knew what my real name was. Later I realized that there was a feature asking you to type in the name of your friends based on their profile picture as a security measure (perhaps for account recovery?) anyway I suspect this one way they may have flagged my account. If friends recovering their account typed in my real name enough times, but got all the other names correct they might flag my account.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Yea good example of how network effects really work. In this case your network opted in to Facebook and opted your data in - so again "guilty by association."

kodt 9y ago

I had a fake name on my account, but all of my real life friends knew what my name on Facebook was. I liked this system as it allowed me to connect with my friends without worrying too much about my name and data being out there. Eventually Facebook said I had an invalid name and needed to change it. So I tried changing it to another fake name, which was rejected. I tried several more, including perfectly normal names and all were rejected. Not even abbreviations were accepted, it had to be my full exact name. Facebook knew what my real name was. Later I realized that there was a feature asking you to type in the name of your friends based on their profile picture as a security measure (perhaps for account recovery?) anyway I suspect this one way they may have flagged my account. If friends recovering their account typed in my real name enough times, but got all the other names correct they might flag my account.