8 ms·

I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately,

I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only one - it is almost impossible to find an actual human from Facebook to solve this kind of verification problem. All I wanted is to delete it, but I can't. Now, my account becomes a zombie, can't be used, can't be deleted, and has lots of personal information. All thanks to the falsehoods Facebook programmers believed about phone numbers, and its non-existent "customer [0]" service. I've heard Google has similar issues [1], if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human... Repeat after me: fxxk Facebook. [0] because I'm the product, not the customer? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886804, and read this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887548

AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
I do wonder how EU's "right to be forgotten" comes into the play here. Could it be used in your case?
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  First, to my knowledge, there are two alternative ways to recover my account within the Facebook system. 1. Correctly identify some personal information about your Facebook friends, or ask them to provide some information about you. However, I have abandoned my account for years, and clearly I no longer have personal contact with most of them. 2. Provide your National-ID document to Facebook. Obviously, I'm not comfortable with it, but I assume my identity is already public information on Facebook so I may have to do it. Unfortunately, the bigger problem is that, personally, I'm in the middle of some tricky paperwork problem with the government bureaucracy, just like my Facebook account. I may need to go to the court to sort it out, but currently I don't have time to bother. "Right to be forgotten" and GDPR seems to be a powerful tool to solve these kind of problems, but I'm not a EU citizen and I don't know much about its regulations, but I also want to know about it. Does anyone know something about it? Assuming I'm a EU citizen, how exactly, can I submit a request of information removal? If it's similar to DMCA takedowns, perhaps it can be used? Or it need a rigorous legal proof of identity like (2)? For non-EU citizens, is there a similar outlet to solve these kinds of problems?
- ajnin 8y ago
  Eu's GDPR defines several rights and obligations, one of which is : Personal data shall be [...] accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay (‘accuracy’); OP could contact Facebook's Data Protection Officer, that they are required to have, and demand that his data is fixed. A complaint can also be filed to the relevant country's Data Protection Authority if needed (I've done it with some success).
  - Jolter 8y ago
    But how will he verify that he actually is the person who owns the account? Well, in this case, he still owns the email so it should work.
tomglynch 8y ago
fxxk Facebook
miketery 8y ago
This story seems perfectly relevant - "computers don't argue" https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133 https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  It's a perfect story! Hard to believe that the story was written in 1966, it resembles a common argument with your ISP. ;-) And we also have government employees who cannot pass the Turing test... (to other readers: click "next page" to read the rest of the story) The most absurd aspect of my Facebook verification problem is, despite my account has been frozen due to "suspicious activities", their system is still sending those automated mail notices to remind me returning to Facebook for those activities I've been missed on my timeline! WTF.
markdown 8y ago
> I've heard Google has similar issues, if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human... I have had great support via phone, chat, and email with google a number of times over the past 3 years, and I live on an island foreign to Google in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My experience has been that if you're using a paid Google product, the support is excellent.
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  I have similar experience with most paid services online, so I think the point is clear - you have to be an actual customer with your payment, although it won't guarantee that you will be treated nicely as a customer, but otherwise, it's certain that you are almost always the product.
jfaat 8y ago
Since you know the number, have you considered reaching out to its current owner to coordinate passing off the code?
- sbr464 8y ago
  That’s actually a pretty popular phishing method currently.
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  Good idea! I'll try. Thanks! The number may or may not be recycled, in case it's not recycled, it would simply be a NULL number. Wish me luck...
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    If its not recycled, perhaps you can find the company that has it ... "my lucky number is 441 743, any chance i can get a number that ends like that?". I guess it depends how much time/money you want to spend.
krick 8y ago
No, as much as I hate Facebook: fuck phone numbers. The idea of using phone number as a personal identification tool is so bad, I'm struggling to believe this is not some kind of conspiracy designed for the solely purpose of mocking the user. It is bad enough that phone numbers exist at all in the eyes of the end user by the year 2019, 15 years after Skype with user-friendly logins appeared and when about a half of the planet uses the phone almost solely for the purpose of having a pocket-size internet access device anyway. But making phone numbers a passport of sorts (a proprietary, insecure, easy to lose passport, over which you have basically no control) is the worst, the most stupid/evil idea ever. And there's no way around it, it is used by (supposedly "secure") whatsapp, telegram, google, facebook, every fucking pizza delivery service and, well, basically everything else. And I hate every single person responsible for helping that happen. Seriously, I would do everything I can to destroy fucking phone numbers, but I have no idea how can we stop this madness.
- segfaultbuserr 8y ago
  anti-spam, they said... and you also have this (vomit), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18085580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18085580 Yes Facebook is using your 2FA phone number to target you with ads
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Well, I don't have a phone - have never had a mobile phone. So..I have other problems instead I guess. But not that one.
  - sandov 8y ago
    Before switching to Linux I thought it would be hard to live without Windows. it wasn't. Before purging Facebook and Twitter from my life I thought it would be inconvenient to live without them, it isn't. Living without a phone looks inconvenient, but I think I'm going to try it some time this year.
  - kome 8y ago
    same, i don't have a phone number. my biggest issue is with one of my two banks, but the other one works just fine without any cellphone.
distantaidenn 8y ago
Storytime: I bounce between Japan and Korea for work. I was in Seoul for about a year and a half and naturally had a Korean phone number. I used this number to sign up for Line (a popular chat service in the two countries), and I also linked my email address to the account. So when it was time to move back to Japan, I naturally canceled my Korean phone service. Fast forward 6 months, and my Line account suddenly disappears. I contact customer service, and it seems someone else had registered for Line with my previous phone number -- which was of course release when I canceled my service with the telecom in Korea. I was informed that it's Line's policy to only allow one account per phone number, and thus they deleted my old account when the other person registered. There was no way to recover it. I even reached out to one of my engineering friends that worked for Line, at the time. Some of my friends, I only knew and communicated with through Line, and I have no way to find or contact them again. So yeah, fxxk using phone numbers as identification.
- komali2 8y ago
  Line is the worse violator of these principles. Last I used it, in order to install it on another device, you had to back up all that device's data (contacts, etc) to a computer, put your account on another device which then triggers a non negotiable wipe of the other device's data whenever it connects to the internet, then download the backup to your new device. Hell.
  - Tor3 8y ago
    The first of the two bad thing about Line is that connection to a phone number. Wife got a new iPad, and, because of the other bad thing - that Line only works on a single device - it had to be 'moved' to the new iPad. Which needs a confirmation by phone message. And that phone was in Japan, unlike my wife, and wouldn't have worked for text messages even if she had brought it (phone plan didn't allow international calls or text). Contacted Line and got all kinds of useless advice - at least there are people in the other end - but nothing worked. Had to create a new account. The backing-up and restore is the easy part. Not much help if you can't move the account due to that silly phone number lock-in.
kkarakk 8y ago
Currently facing the same problem with apple and icloud, their customer support is being excruciating about it
B-Con 8y ago
We're in an age where it's scary to lose access to an e-mail addresses or phone number are at the top of that list. I don't mean to change it, I mean to lose access to it. If you change it, find a way to hold onto access to the last one. I learned this lesson relatively easily. I had a vanity domain that also received my e-mail and I eventually replaced it with a different one. I ran the new domain and e-mail for a few years before allowing the domain registration on the old one to expire. I hadn't received (non-spam) e-mail on it in a couple years, seemed safe enough. Turns out I've had a few websites over the year since that I wanted to login to and I needed to recover my password, either because I forgot or the site had forced a reset due to a breach. I hadn't updated my e-mail on a few of those sites. I don't think I'll let go of a main e-mail address or phone number again.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
too big to be polite
- nailuj 8y ago
  The matter is more simple, Facebook users are not Facebook customers, hence no customer support. Same story with free Google accounts.
estsauver 8y ago
Send a GPDR removal request?
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
If the number has been reassigned you could ring the person, explain the situation and get them to forward you the code. (Also a way to crack other people's accounts!). I wonder if phone companies couldn't [partially] solve this; probably any system would be too open to abuse?
- ams6110 8y ago
  That happened to me once. I declined to provide the code. Might have been legit but seemed too big a risk of getting my phone number tied to something scammy or even criminal.
dkarl 8y ago
Now, my account becomes a zombie, can't be used, can't be deleted, and has lots of personal information. All thanks to the falsehoods Facebook programmers believed about phone numbers, and its non-existent "customer [0]" service. I think it's naive to think that this wasn't decided at the product level. This exact scenario was discussed, along with many others like it, and this is how they decided to handle it. "So they'll have a profile up with their personal information, maybe some embarrassing stuff they posted in college, and now they're adult and looking for a job and it'll be up forever looking like they intentionally left it that way?" "Yes." "Okay." "It's fine." "I mean...." "Do you have a solution that doesn't cost money?" "No, but...." "So you want to propose we spend money fixing this?" "...." "Okay, so we're agreed that this is fine. Moving on."
ams6110 8y ago
An old eBay account of mine is in the same zombie state because it's wanting to use an old phone number that I no longer control to "verify" me.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
> it is almost impossible to find an actual human from Facebook to solve this kind of verification problem. I have come to realize that if you do not deal with a real person when signing up for some service, you will never get to deal with a real person when you need one. Customer service doesn't exist at FB, Google, etc. because they aren't customer oriented companies. They were not created to service you, they were created to use you.

AnaniasAnanas 8y ago

I do wonder how EU's "right to be forgotten" comes into the play here. Could it be used in your case?

segfaultbuserr 8y ago
First, to my knowledge, there are two alternative ways to recover my account within the Facebook system. 1. Correctly identify some personal information about your Facebook friends, or ask them to provide some information about you. However, I have abandoned my account for years, and clearly I no longer have personal contact with most of them. 2. Provide your National-ID document to Facebook. Obviously, I'm not comfortable with it, but I assume my identity is already public information on Facebook so I may have to do it. Unfortunately, the bigger problem is that, personally, I'm in the middle of some tricky paperwork problem with the government bureaucracy, just like my Facebook account. I may need to go to the court to sort it out, but currently I don't have time to bother. "Right to be forgotten" and GDPR seems to be a powerful tool to solve these kind of problems, but I'm not a EU citizen and I don't know much about its regulations, but I also want to know about it. Does anyone know something about it? Assuming I'm a EU citizen, how exactly, can I submit a request of information removal? If it's similar to DMCA takedowns, perhaps it can be used? Or it need a rigorous legal proof of identity like (2)? For non-EU citizens, is there a similar outlet to solve these kinds of problems?
ajnin 8y ago
Eu's GDPR defines several rights and obligations, one of which is : Personal data shall be [...] accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay (‘accuracy’); OP could contact Facebook's Data Protection Officer, that they are required to have, and demand that his data is fixed. A complaint can also be filed to the relevant country's Data Protection Authority if needed (I've done it with some success).
- Jolter 8y ago
  But how will he verify that he actually is the person who owns the account? Well, in this case, he still owns the email so it should work.

tomglynch 8y ago

fxxk Facebook

miketery 8y ago

This story seems perfectly relevant - "computers don't argue" https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133 https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133

segfaultbuserr 8y ago
It's a perfect story! Hard to believe that the story was written in 1966, it resembles a common argument with your ISP. ;-) And we also have government employees who cannot pass the Turing test... (to other readers: click "next page" to read the rest of the story) The most absurd aspect of my Facebook verification problem is, despite my account has been frozen due to "suspicious activities", their system is still sending those automated mail notices to remind me returning to Facebook for those activities I've been missed on my timeline! WTF.

markdown 8y ago

> I've heard Google has similar issues, if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human... I have had great support via phone, chat, and email with google a number of times over the past 3 years, and I live on an island foreign to Google in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My experience has been that if you're using a paid Google product, the support is excellent.

segfaultbuserr 8y ago
I have similar experience with most paid services online, so I think the point is clear - you have to be an actual customer with your payment, although it won't guarantee that you will be treated nicely as a customer, but otherwise, it's certain that you are almost always the product.

jfaat 8y ago

Since you know the number, have you considered reaching out to its current owner to coordinate passing off the code?

sbr464 8y ago
That’s actually a pretty popular phishing method currently.
segfaultbuserr 8y ago
Good idea! I'll try. Thanks! The number may or may not be recycled, in case it's not recycled, it would simply be a NULL number. Wish me luck...
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  If its not recycled, perhaps you can find the company that has it ... "my lucky number is 441 743, any chance i can get a number that ends like that?". I guess it depends how much time/money you want to spend.

krick 8y ago

No, as much as I hate Facebook: fuck phone numbers. The idea of using phone number as a personal identification tool is so bad, I'm struggling to believe this is not some kind of conspiracy designed for the solely purpose of mocking the user. It is bad enough that phone numbers exist at all in the eyes of the end user by the year 2019, 15 years after Skype with user-friendly logins appeared and when about a half of the planet uses the phone almost solely for the purpose of having a pocket-size internet access device anyway. But making phone numbers a passport of sorts (a proprietary, insecure, easy to lose passport, over which you have basically no control) is the worst, the most stupid/evil idea ever. And there's no way around it, it is used by (supposedly "secure") whatsapp, telegram, google, facebook, every fucking pizza delivery service and, well, basically everything else. And I hate every single person responsible for helping that happen. Seriously, I would do everything I can to destroy fucking phone numbers, but I have no idea how can we stop this madness.

segfaultbuserr 8y ago
anti-spam, they said... and you also have this (vomit), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18085580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18085580 Yes Facebook is using your 2FA phone number to target you with ads
yesenadam 8y ago
Well, I don't have a phone - have never had a mobile phone. So..I have other problems instead I guess. But not that one.
- sandov 8y ago
  Before switching to Linux I thought it would be hard to live without Windows. it wasn't. Before purging Facebook and Twitter from my life I thought it would be inconvenient to live without them, it isn't. Living without a phone looks inconvenient, but I think I'm going to try it some time this year.
- kome 8y ago
  same, i don't have a phone number. my biggest issue is with one of my two banks, but the other one works just fine without any cellphone.

distantaidenn 8y ago

Storytime: I bounce between Japan and Korea for work. I was in Seoul for about a year and a half and naturally had a Korean phone number. I used this number to sign up for Line (a popular chat service in the two countries), and I also linked my email address to the account. So when it was time to move back to Japan, I naturally canceled my Korean phone service. Fast forward 6 months, and my Line account suddenly disappears. I contact customer service, and it seems someone else had registered for Line with my previous phone number -- which was of course release when I canceled my service with the telecom in Korea. I was informed that it's Line's policy to only allow one account per phone number, and thus they deleted my old account when the other person registered. There was no way to recover it. I even reached out to one of my engineering friends that worked for Line, at the time. Some of my friends, I only knew and communicated with through Line, and I have no way to find or contact them again. So yeah, fxxk using phone numbers as identification.

komali2 8y ago
Line is the worse violator of these principles. Last I used it, in order to install it on another device, you had to back up all that device's data (contacts, etc) to a computer, put your account on another device which then triggers a non negotiable wipe of the other device's data whenever it connects to the internet, then download the backup to your new device. Hell.
- Tor3 8y ago
  The first of the two bad thing about Line is that connection to a phone number. Wife got a new iPad, and, because of the other bad thing - that Line only works on a single device - it had to be 'moved' to the new iPad. Which needs a confirmation by phone message. And that phone was in Japan, unlike my wife, and wouldn't have worked for text messages even if she had brought it (phone plan didn't allow international calls or text). Contacted Line and got all kinds of useless advice - at least there are people in the other end - but nothing worked. Had to create a new account. The backing-up and restore is the easy part. Not much help if you can't move the account due to that silly phone number lock-in.

kkarakk 8y ago

Currently facing the same problem with apple and icloud, their customer support is being excruciating about it

B-Con 8y ago

We're in an age where it's scary to lose access to an e-mail addresses or phone number are at the top of that list. I don't mean to change it, I mean to lose access to it. If you change it, find a way to hold onto access to the last one. I learned this lesson relatively easily. I had a vanity domain that also received my e-mail and I eventually replaced it with a different one. I ran the new domain and e-mail for a few years before allowing the domain registration on the old one to expire. I hadn't received (non-spam) e-mail on it in a couple years, seemed safe enough. Turns out I've had a few websites over the year since that I wanted to login to and I needed to recover my password, either because I forgot or the site had forced a reset due to a breach. I hadn't updated my e-mail on a few of those sites. I don't think I'll let go of a main e-mail address or phone number again.

DoctorOetker 8y ago

too big to be polite

nailuj 8y ago
The matter is more simple, Facebook users are not Facebook customers, hence no customer support. Same story with free Google accounts.

estsauver 8y ago

Send a GPDR removal request?

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

If the number has been reassigned you could ring the person, explain the situation and get them to forward you the code. (Also a way to crack other people's accounts!). I wonder if phone companies couldn't [partially] solve this; probably any system would be too open to abuse?

ams6110 8y ago
That happened to me once. I declined to provide the code. Might have been legit but seemed too big a risk of getting my phone number tied to something scammy or even criminal.

dkarl 8y ago

Now, my account becomes a zombie, can't be used, can't be deleted, and has lots of personal information. All thanks to the falsehoods Facebook programmers believed about phone numbers, and its non-existent "customer [0]" service. I think it's naive to think that this wasn't decided at the product level. This exact scenario was discussed, along with many others like it, and this is how they decided to handle it. "So they'll have a profile up with their personal information, maybe some embarrassing stuff they posted in college, and now they're adult and looking for a job and it'll be up forever looking like they intentionally left it that way?" "Yes." "Okay." "It's fine." "I mean...." "Do you have a solution that doesn't cost money?" "No, but...." "So you want to propose we spend money fixing this?" "...." "Okay, so we're agreed that this is fine. Moving on."

ams6110 8y ago

An old eBay account of mine is in the same zombie state because it's wanting to use an old phone number that I no longer control to "verify" me.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

> it is almost impossible to find an actual human from Facebook to solve this kind of verification problem. I have come to realize that if you do not deal with a real person when signing up for some service, you will never get to deal with a real person when you need one. Customer service doesn't exist at FB, Google, etc. because they aren't customer oriented companies. They were not created to service you, they were created to use you.