6 ms·

The fake Facebook profile I could not get removed

65 points by noahc 16y ago

jrockway 16y ago
"The country they're in may have laws against this very thing." Why not tell us the country and what laws there are? The reality is that anyone can create any web page they want, and you'll never be able to find them. You need to figure out some other strategy to manage your identity, like advertising to your fanbase what your real Facebook profile is. Personally, when I see something on the Internet (social profile or otherwise), I usually assume it's fake. It boggles my mind that other people don't do this. And that's the real problem.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  Public/private keypairs could help here, actually. A space in the profile to post your public key, as well as a short line of text, and then the same line encrypted with your private key. Of course, I guess a fake account could generate their own keypair, and it would be hard to prove to the internet at large whose keypair truly belongs to you.
  - jackolas 16y ago
    Just get it signed, twitter's verified accounts are kind of like this but without any key exchanging involved. Verification is easy compared to getting people to use PKI stuff.
    - thwarted 16y ago
      Verification is easy compared to getting people to use PKI stuff. I wonder what kind of inroads Facebook could make concerning public knowledge of crypto by allowing people to post cryptographically verified entries using an SSL client cert.
  - biot 16y ago
    If you only need to prove to people who recognize you which account is real, post a video of yourself explaining how to tell the difference.
- revdinosaur 16y ago
  Deduction leads me to believe that she's talking about the UK. It's another English speaking country which likely has been exposed to her and her work in some form. Secondly, it has notoriously harsh libel and slander laws. I think that pining for laws like that, as a writer, is horrendously self-sabotaging as it is akin to call for truncations in the First Amendment.
D3lt4 16y ago
This story was a little too dramatic.
philk 16y ago
She's incredibly melodramatic: It made my heart bleed. A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't follow conversations. Words swam. Reading the profile was like plunging into an icy pond from such a high distance it felt as if I'd slammed into a wall. And then the sensation of drowning. I can't help but think there are people out there dealing with real, serious problems who bear them with much more dignity.
- jacobbijani 16y ago
  She writes thriller novels...
- anonym9 16y ago
  I'm the victim of a stalker, and I can say that it does tear up your life, feeling so powerless, but I still wish the author could have used a simpler, less affected tone. Even though I can Absolutely relate, and I even feared for my life, her approach didn't evoke much of my sympathy!
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- afterburner 16y ago
  Isn't dignity had through action? That is, feeling the emotions as she did, but acting dignified regardless? Which she did?
_delirium 16y ago
This seems to be becoming more common, and Facebook as far as I can tell has no active process for it. A professor I know had a phisher create a duplicate profile with the information/photo cloned from his, who then sent friend requests to all his friends, which a bunch of people reflexively accepted thinking maybe he got a new profile or something. Then people (esp. people over 30) were really confused over the next two weeks or so about which profile was the real one and which was the fake one, though I don't think anybody fell for the phishing scam. To avoid getting the messages the phisher started sending, some people just defriended both profiles! Facebook didn't respond even after dozens of people clicked the report-this-profile button. Eventually it got taken down only when a friend-of-a-friend of his who works at Facebook promised to pass on the information to the right person.
- TheAmazingIdiot 16y ago
  Considering the person is of some renown, She could have hired an attorney and had a nice amount of money from Facebook. I'm thinking of $1 million damages, with $100 million putative for not having an access to challenge and dispute these kinds of identity theft and character assassination. So my question... Why wasn't "Lawyer Up" the first thing she thought of?
  - slapshot 16y ago
    > Why wasn't "Lawyer Up" the first thing she thought of? It's not clear that a lawyer would matter. Facebook would plead immunity under CDA 230 [1]. Facebook would claim that CDA 230 grants complete immunity to hosts for user-created content, and that the fake profile is user-created content. The legal theory "you should have made your website better" has yet to gain a lot of legal traction. Maybe it should, but it hasn't yet. [1] Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996
    - enjo 16y ago
      Yep, in particular I recall a case involving AOL in which a man claimed negligence on the part of AOL for not policing their forums, allowing for people to defame him. The court ruled that providing that type of policing would have turned AOL into a publisher, which is exactly what 230 protects against. I think the same thing would apply here.
markkat 16y ago
That was difficult to read. That situation was a bummer, not soul-stealing. I wonder if the author understands how self-absorbed and rantish that article sounded to so many readers. I think she severely overestimated the gravity of the situation.
jackolas 16y ago
Unearned income is not lost money. I stopped reading right there.
- biot 16y ago
  While you're technically correct, incidents like this can be actionable under tort law and damages claimed to compensate for income not earned. If you always earn $10,000 a day in profit from customers entering your shop, and someone barricades the entrance to your shop for one day, I don't think you'd have a hard time in court showing that you "lost" $10,000 that day.
  - drdaeman 16y ago
    This is quite an incorrect analogy, as in this case nobody prevented anyone from buying the books. Comparsion to a store, earning $10K every day, then "losing" 90% because someone spreads a gossip that your store sells very low quality stuff, would be much more appropriate. Just an old plain defamation.
gohat 16y ago
Yes, it is a bit melodramatic. I think the key message of this article is to realize how much power big internet companies have gained over our lives. And how they don't find dealing with problems efficient, so just rely on automated systems that can greatly fail people.
ttttannebaum 16y ago
"A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't follow conversations. Words swam. Worst of all, I couldn't write. Writing is what I do. It's how I make my way in the world, how I help put food on the table, a roof over our heads, paid for the shoes on our kids' feet and the education they've taken out the door." Jesus Christ, fly to Palo Alto and storm into the headquarters yourself if it comes to that.
Udo 16y ago
It's overly melodramatic, yes, but that's not the most important thing wrong with this article. > The Internet makes it easy to casually carve up real people in some cartoon world. A drive-by shooting, a stab in the dark. A fast, vicious punch to the reputation. Easy to do damage. And awfully hard to repair. Nice call for internet censorship by the way, these are coming up more often recently. But that's not author's main failure here either. Instead the glaringly obvious problem with this whole viewpoint is her alarming ignorance of how easily more fake profiles could appear all over the place. For a borderline Luddite it may seem miraculous, but it's really not hard to publish disparaging content about a person. If someone really hates you, they will do something like this again and it takes very little effort. For victims hitting the "report abuse" button is always a good step, but other than that a healthy sense of detachment is clearly called for. Celebrities (I use the word loosely here) who are that prone to collapse from mind-bogglingly childish psychological assaults should probably not be on the web at all period.
sp4rki 16y ago
This was ridiculously painful to read. Melodramatic would be an understatement, and for what it's worth, this article has automatically made me decide that if I ever come across anything this person produces, I'm not buying it.
georgieporgie 16y ago
Moral: sign up with popular social networking sites and keep an eye on your Google rank. I had friend with the same name as a porn star. Luckily, the porn star was in the downward portion of her career arc.
corin_ 16y ago
I really hope this never happens to her again, not because I particularly care about her feelings, but because I wouldn't want anyone to have to read that essay of whining again.
afterburner 16y ago
What contributed the most to the powerlessness I believe is the lack of customer support from Facebook. No doubt having half a billion customers makes this quite the challenge to say the least, but that lack of recourse is what amplifies these feelings.
- vesrin 16y ago
  But you are not a customer since you don't pay for the service, you are a user - so it's user support, not customer support. The customers are the people/companies who buy ads to finance Facebook. Why would they bother that much with the user's problems - it's not like you can easily quit anyway.
  - afterburner 16y ago
    So what's your point? Never open a Facebook account? It would be a logical response, one which would impact Facebook customers. So would, say, having login problems and not being able to log in to see all those ads. It seems user problems can impact the customer after all.
nowarninglabel 16y ago
"Emotions roiled, all dark. The depth of my anger scared me. I wanted them hurt, scared, suffering. I wanted them to pay" There are some serious problems with this woman that she found her entire life ruined, and provoked to wanting violent revenge, over a kid putting up a fake profile with some sexual pejoratives.
Cadsby 16y ago
Yes, the writing style was nauseatingly dramatic, but the callous, dismissive tone of most of the commenters is telling. How would you feel if someone creating a profile/website accusing you of being a child molester? No matter how crudely designed and obvious a fake it was, a lot of people, many of whom you might now, would believe it. These kinds of things don't just wash off and go away.
- D3lt4 16y ago
  Some of the points she made were quite good and somewhat scary, but it shows pretty much what facebook has been this whole time, irresponsible, whether it is with privacy or scenarios such as this one.
A1kmm 16y ago
If someone uploaded a photo of her from her website, presumably one she held the copyright in, wouldn't she have been better off trying to get the photograph taken down on the grounds that it is pirated? I'm sure Facebook responds to DMCA takedown requests reasonably promptly - and once a human is aware of the account being a fake, they would undoubtedly want to take the whole profile down too.
mike-cardwell 16y ago
I know this is immensely geeky and of no use to the average Facebook user, but my Facebook profile "about information" is PGP signed so people (who know how) can verify that it belongs to me: https://www.facebook.com/imike3 https://www.facebook.com/imike3 (You can only see this URL when logged in) FireGPG users can auto detect the signed text in the page and have it verify inline in the page. Just paste the signed text into "cat|gpg --verify" and done. I mention my profile ID and username inside the signed text to prevent replay attacks where someone simply copies my signed text and adds it to their own profile.
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  Before any smart alec points it out, the "cat|" is redundant in the above. "gpg --verify" is sufficient. My HN profile is also PGP signed.

65 points by noahc 16y ago

"The country they're in may have laws against this very thing." Why not tell us the country and what laws there are? The reality is that anyone can create any web page they want, and you'll never be able to find them. You need to figure out some other strategy to manage your identity, like advertising to your fanbase what your real Facebook profile is. Personally, when I see something on the Internet (social profile or otherwise), I usually assume it's fake. It boggles my mind that other people don't do this. And that's the real problem.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
Public/private keypairs could help here, actually. A space in the profile to post your public key, as well as a short line of text, and then the same line encrypted with your private key. Of course, I guess a fake account could generate their own keypair, and it would be hard to prove to the internet at large whose keypair truly belongs to you.
- jackolas 16y ago
  Just get it signed, twitter's verified accounts are kind of like this but without any key exchanging involved. Verification is easy compared to getting people to use PKI stuff.
  - thwarted 16y ago
    Verification is easy compared to getting people to use PKI stuff. I wonder what kind of inroads Facebook could make concerning public knowledge of crypto by allowing people to post cryptographically verified entries using an SSL client cert.
- biot 16y ago
  If you only need to prove to people who recognize you which account is real, post a video of yourself explaining how to tell the difference.
revdinosaur 16y ago
Deduction leads me to believe that she's talking about the UK. It's another English speaking country which likely has been exposed to her and her work in some form. Secondly, it has notoriously harsh libel and slander laws. I think that pining for laws like that, as a writer, is horrendously self-sabotaging as it is akin to call for truncations in the First Amendment.

D3lt4 16y ago

This story was a little too dramatic.

philk 16y ago

She's incredibly melodramatic: It made my heart bleed. A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't follow conversations. Words swam. Reading the profile was like plunging into an icy pond from such a high distance it felt as if I'd slammed into a wall. And then the sensation of drowning. I can't help but think there are people out there dealing with real, serious problems who bear them with much more dignity.

jacobbijani 16y ago
She writes thriller novels...
anonym9 16y ago
I'm the victim of a stalker, and I can say that it does tear up your life, feeling so powerless, but I still wish the author could have used a simpler, less affected tone. Even though I can Absolutely relate, and I even feared for my life, her approach didn't evoke much of my sympathy!
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
afterburner 16y ago
Isn't dignity had through action? That is, feeling the emotions as she did, but acting dignified regardless? Which she did?

_delirium 16y ago

This seems to be becoming more common, and Facebook as far as I can tell has no active process for it. A professor I know had a phisher create a duplicate profile with the information/photo cloned from his, who then sent friend requests to all his friends, which a bunch of people reflexively accepted thinking maybe he got a new profile or something. Then people (esp. people over 30) were really confused over the next two weeks or so about which profile was the real one and which was the fake one, though I don't think anybody fell for the phishing scam. To avoid getting the messages the phisher started sending, some people just defriended both profiles! Facebook didn't respond even after dozens of people clicked the report-this-profile button. Eventually it got taken down only when a friend-of-a-friend of his who works at Facebook promised to pass on the information to the right person.

TheAmazingIdiot 16y ago
Considering the person is of some renown, She could have hired an attorney and had a nice amount of money from Facebook. I'm thinking of $1 million damages, with $100 million putative for not having an access to challenge and dispute these kinds of identity theft and character assassination. So my question... Why wasn't "Lawyer Up" the first thing she thought of?
- slapshot 16y ago
  > Why wasn't "Lawyer Up" the first thing she thought of? It's not clear that a lawyer would matter. Facebook would plead immunity under CDA 230 [1]. Facebook would claim that CDA 230 grants complete immunity to hosts for user-created content, and that the fake profile is user-created content. The legal theory "you should have made your website better" has yet to gain a lot of legal traction. Maybe it should, but it hasn't yet. [1] Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996
  - enjo 16y ago
    Yep, in particular I recall a case involving AOL in which a man claimed negligence on the part of AOL for not policing their forums, allowing for people to defame him. The court ruled that providing that type of policing would have turned AOL into a publisher, which is exactly what 230 protects against. I think the same thing would apply here.

markkat 16y ago

That was difficult to read. That situation was a bummer, not soul-stealing. I wonder if the author understands how self-absorbed and rantish that article sounded to so many readers. I think she severely overestimated the gravity of the situation.

jackolas 16y ago

Unearned income is not lost money. I stopped reading right there.

biot 16y ago
While you're technically correct, incidents like this can be actionable under tort law and damages claimed to compensate for income not earned. If you always earn $10,000 a day in profit from customers entering your shop, and someone barricades the entrance to your shop for one day, I don't think you'd have a hard time in court showing that you "lost" $10,000 that day.
- drdaeman 16y ago
  This is quite an incorrect analogy, as in this case nobody prevented anyone from buying the books. Comparsion to a store, earning $10K every day, then "losing" 90% because someone spreads a gossip that your store sells very low quality stuff, would be much more appropriate. Just an old plain defamation.

gohat 16y ago

Yes, it is a bit melodramatic. I think the key message of this article is to realize how much power big internet companies have gained over our lives. And how they don't find dealing with problems efficient, so just rely on automated systems that can greatly fail people.

ttttannebaum 16y ago

"A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't follow conversations. Words swam. Worst of all, I couldn't write. Writing is what I do. It's how I make my way in the world, how I help put food on the table, a roof over our heads, paid for the shoes on our kids' feet and the education they've taken out the door." Jesus Christ, fly to Palo Alto and storm into the headquarters yourself if it comes to that.

Udo 16y ago

It's overly melodramatic, yes, but that's not the most important thing wrong with this article. > The Internet makes it easy to casually carve up real people in some cartoon world. A drive-by shooting, a stab in the dark. A fast, vicious punch to the reputation. Easy to do damage. And awfully hard to repair. Nice call for internet censorship by the way, these are coming up more often recently. But that's not author's main failure here either. Instead the glaringly obvious problem with this whole viewpoint is her alarming ignorance of how easily more fake profiles could appear all over the place. For a borderline Luddite it may seem miraculous, but it's really not hard to publish disparaging content about a person. If someone really hates you, they will do something like this again and it takes very little effort. For victims hitting the "report abuse" button is always a good step, but other than that a healthy sense of detachment is clearly called for. Celebrities (I use the word loosely here) who are that prone to collapse from mind-bogglingly childish psychological assaults should probably not be on the web at all period.

sp4rki 16y ago

This was ridiculously painful to read. Melodramatic would be an understatement, and for what it's worth, this article has automatically made me decide that if I ever come across anything this person produces, I'm not buying it.

georgieporgie 16y ago

Moral: sign up with popular social networking sites and keep an eye on your Google rank. I had friend with the same name as a porn star. Luckily, the porn star was in the downward portion of her career arc.

corin_ 16y ago

I really hope this never happens to her again, not because I particularly care about her feelings, but because I wouldn't want anyone to have to read that essay of whining again.

afterburner 16y ago

What contributed the most to the powerlessness I believe is the lack of customer support from Facebook. No doubt having half a billion customers makes this quite the challenge to say the least, but that lack of recourse is what amplifies these feelings.

vesrin 16y ago
But you are not a customer since you don't pay for the service, you are a user - so it's user support, not customer support. The customers are the people/companies who buy ads to finance Facebook. Why would they bother that much with the user's problems - it's not like you can easily quit anyway.
- afterburner 16y ago
  So what's your point? Never open a Facebook account? It would be a logical response, one which would impact Facebook customers. So would, say, having login problems and not being able to log in to see all those ads. It seems user problems can impact the customer after all.

nowarninglabel 16y ago

"Emotions roiled, all dark. The depth of my anger scared me. I wanted them hurt, scared, suffering. I wanted them to pay" There are some serious problems with this woman that she found her entire life ruined, and provoked to wanting violent revenge, over a kid putting up a fake profile with some sexual pejoratives.

Cadsby 16y ago

Yes, the writing style was nauseatingly dramatic, but the callous, dismissive tone of most of the commenters is telling. How would you feel if someone creating a profile/website accusing you of being a child molester? No matter how crudely designed and obvious a fake it was, a lot of people, many of whom you might now, would believe it. These kinds of things don't just wash off and go away.

D3lt4 16y ago
Some of the points she made were quite good and somewhat scary, but it shows pretty much what facebook has been this whole time, irresponsible, whether it is with privacy or scenarios such as this one.

A1kmm 16y ago

If someone uploaded a photo of her from her website, presumably one she held the copyright in, wouldn't she have been better off trying to get the photograph taken down on the grounds that it is pirated? I'm sure Facebook responds to DMCA takedown requests reasonably promptly - and once a human is aware of the account being a fake, they would undoubtedly want to take the whole profile down too.

mike-cardwell 16y ago

I know this is immensely geeky and of no use to the average Facebook user, but my Facebook profile "about information" is PGP signed so people (who know how) can verify that it belongs to me: https://www.facebook.com/imike3 https://www.facebook.com/imike3 (You can only see this URL when logged in) FireGPG users can auto detect the signed text in the page and have it verify inline in the page. Just paste the signed text into "cat|gpg --verify" and done. I mention my profile ID and username inside the signed text to prevent replay attacks where someone simply copies my signed text and adds it to their own profile.

mike-cardwell 16y ago
Before any smart alec points it out, the "cat|" is redundant in the above. "gpg --verify" is sufficient. My HN profile is also PGP signed.