15 ms·

Incarcerated and Facebook

194 points by callumprentice 7y ago

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
This culture of not treating people even half-decently frustrates me. Is it so hard to acknowledge that the user is a human?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  It is. It's very hard, to the point of impossibility, to ensure that not a single one of Facebook's 2.4 billion users will fall into a weird process gap. Other organizations that are smaller by multiple orders of magnitude still regularly fail at it.
  - retrac 7y ago
    It's not when the user falls down a weird gap in the architecture that is frustrating and dehumanizing. It's that there's almost never a way to get ahold of a human to explain what's broken. There is apparently no straightforward way to simply contact Facebook support. I'm not sure they even have support.
    - netsharc 7y ago
      The frustrating thing is, if they had a support team, they'd be inundated with really simple questions. A few years ago an article discussing some new Facebook login feature became the top search result for "Facebook login". What happened next? Thousands of comments on that article in the lines of "I want to login to Facebook, why am I seeing this page instead, please give me back my Facebook!". Google started offering an open-to-the-public question and answers on search results, and some people think that's the place to book a restaurant table after googling said restaurant. There's some article that said 90% of computer users are below proficient, they have their routines but get totally lost if something doesn't work... OTOH, having no support isn't the answer either, especially if the issue is actually on their side, and the user is genuinely inconvenienced.
      - sansnomme 7y ago
        Perhaps it is time to charge for advanced support like AWS. If you want priority support for Facebook where stupid questions are entertained and your hand is held, 99 dollars a year. Considering the value of social media these days, it is not too much to ask, especially if you are an enterprise customer. For everyday customers with non-critical problems that can be solved by Namecheap-style support teams in Eastern Europe, 5 dollars a month.
        nitwit005 7y ago
        If a company like Facebook offered paid support, the press would rush to denounce them for it. It would also probably generate more support scams.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        I don't want support for 99 dollars a year. I'd be happy with $1 a minute or whatever. It's fine to discourage 99% of the support calls normal companies get. Just have something for extreme situations.
        pishpash 7y ago
        And refund if it's their issue, basically a bug bounty with a PEBKAC cost.
        Nextgrid 7y ago
        Instead of a recurring support plan just charge up-front per ticket, something like 50$ or so. The fee is refunded if the issue is on Facebook's fault. This would solve the issue of monkeys wasting support's time while offering a way to get support for those who know what they're doing and are happy to put their dollars on the line.
        nulbyte 7y ago
        > The fee is refunded if the issue is on Facebook's fault. Does this model actually work? I'm sure there are some reputable companies that could make it work, but I'm not sure I know anyone who would trust Facebook to get this right.
  - uberman 7y ago
    I originally just down voted this comment, but I feel it warrants a response rather than a down vote. I removed my down vote so here are my thoughts. Big tech, Google and Facebook in particular don't have "weird process gaps". What they have is a willful ignorance of any and all customer service. They are the vanguard of a new economy devoid of any and all notion of customer service. That quaint notion is too expensive in today's economy. Today, "customer service" is provided via a one way email black hole. The only way anyone gets customer service from any unicorn is either by shaming them in a vial social media post or leveraging an internal contact. There used to be a time where one could call and talk to an actual person who actually worked for the company and might, just might be in a position to help. Those days began to end with the shift to offshore call centers and now have completely vanished thanks to canned email responses. I NEVER in my wildest dreams would have though "I wish Google had an offshore call center to support me". Years ago, while flying British Air from Nairobi to London I had my camera equipment and dress shoes stolen by ground crew. I called up BA and explained that I had watched a person on the tarmac open my bag as it was being loaded onto the plain. I don't even know if the ground crewman was a BA employee or an Airport employee, but the BA rep on the phone told me she was mortified at what had happened and the next day they couriered a check to me. No bickering, no stonewalling, no email voids, just pure customer service. That one great experience was snatched from the jaws of disappointment by a timely customer service rep with the authority to help and has meant that I will fly BA whenever it is possible over all other airline options. Would they do the same today? I doubt it, but they did it once and I will always be a fan as a result.
    - rckoepke 7y ago
      Just 3 years ago BA went above and beyond for me when I left a wallet on a plane, but didn't find out until I was in a different terminal (45 minutes later), and couldn't go back due to security/visa checkpoints. BA sent runners to the plane in the other terminal and they physically carried my wallet with all cards/cash in it to me. I've heard a lot of well-deserved criticism of BA as well, but it does seem like many of their staff are still willing to go above and beyond.
      - teh_klev 7y ago
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    If those gaps are that rare, then how hard could it be to employ a few human beings who are empowered to help the vanishingly-few users who fall through the cracks? Either the gaps are not that rare, or FB doesn't give a shit. There are no other options.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      Your intuition for the size of the problem here is off. If "vanishingly few" means that a tenth of a percent fall through some crack each year, that's 2 million cases annually. In practice, I bet Facebook does even better than that, but I would be very surprised if it were a workload that could be handled by just a few extra people.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        You know, when a few million people "fall through the cracks" due to some governmental screw-up, people get really bent out of shape.
        SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        Do they? They get moderately annoyed, certainly, and they have every right to. But the DMV issues mistaken suspensions all the time, and I don't think many people see that as either a critically important issue or proof that the government is evil.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        I think people do, the idea of being stuck in a bad situation due to a heartless bureaucracy with no way out is something people obsess over, and are disturbed by it happening to even a single person. Have you ever seen "Brazil"? Read something by Kafka? Talked to a (US-style) libertarian or conservative, particularly about the early Soviet Union?
      - CamperBob2 7y ago
        Imagine if, say, a tenth of a percent of cars failed to start in the morning. That would be considered a big deal, wouldn't it? Enough to employ people to look into the problem(s) and fix them?
  - coffeefirst 7y ago
    That’s true, but look, nobody made them get that big. They worked really hard to make it happen. And good for them, but scale is not a get out of responsibility free card.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    If it's "too big to care", then perhaps it should be trimmed down to size? Industries where you have many different companies competing for customers somehow manage to have decent customer support.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    It's very hard, to the point of impossibility, to ensure that not a single one of Facebook's 2.4 billion users will fall into a weird process gap. So Facebook should just admit it doesn't scale, and work on doing things smaller and better. If it was a startup, the HN crowd would be all about "doesn't scale!" But since it's a FAANG, it's, "Sure! Just keep on going and hurting society. Am I vested yet?"
- netsharc 7y ago
  Or that a human working for FB can make a mistake and put someone else "in jail". No, thought the dev team, this mistake would never happen, the only way to "get out of jail" is to show us your release papers! It's pervasive, isn't it. Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist. What I realized once was, the TSA agent doesn't want or isn't allowed to think and make decisions, because making decisions mean being responsible for those decisions...
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    > Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist. Unfortunately, children being used for smuggling stuff or as bombs on legs is nothing new :'( Humans are cruel.
- pureagave 7y ago
  I’m reminded of the old comic where it shows that Facebook’s users are the product. The advertisers are the only customers. Why should they care to deal with one billionth of their product if it is accidentally marked bad?
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    This is something people always repeat, but it's nonsense. Facebook (and similar companies) is a middleman between users and advertisers. Neither party is uniquely a "customer" versus the other, and advertisers have basically the same problem of being a very small part of the business and therefore unimportant and without leverage.
- Iv 7y ago
  Well the user is the product. Considering it human would interfere with the bottom line.
craigds 7y ago
Why do they even have this process? Who cares if someone in prison uses Facebook? This is pretty absurd.
- notatoad 7y ago
  yeah, the fact that facebook locks the accounts of people who are currently incarcerated is the most interesting part of this post to me. why is that any of their business?
  - nateburke 7y ago
    Maybe they don't want to have, e.g. convicted rapists going on the books as 'liking' ads for paying customers
    - pmiller2 7y ago
      Then they ought to make people agree to a background check before signing up for an account.
    - pell 7y ago
      The way American society treats convicts and ex-convicts is baffling to me. It's as if rehabilitation is not even a pretense anymore.
      - codegladiator 7y ago
        Innocent until proven guilty. Never innocent once proven guilty.
        pell 7y ago
        I didn't talk about innocence. I am talking about human dignity and rehabilitation.
        tyingq 7y ago
        The plea bargain system in the US pretty much guarantees a fair amount of convicted people aren't guilty of anything other than making a very tough risk management decision.
badrabbit 7y ago
Curious, is there even a paid alternative to FB?
- lwhalen 7y ago
  Thinkspot, MeWe, and Mastodon.
mirimir 7y ago
> My best guess though is that it was the same person who seems to be trying to get access to my account with weekly password reset requests and offers to purchase it. Please say more.
- callumprentice 7y ago
  Not much more to say I am afraid. I get frequent (weekly, sometimes more) emails from Facebook containing password reset instructions "as per my request". At least two people have begged me to give up my account name (just my first name) that I seem to have got years ago - not sure it's even used or relevant anymore. My initial assumption was that if they can't get the account, they would just try and mess it up for me. On reflection it's probably unrelated and just one of those things.. I guess if they're reading this post, I'll find out soon :)
  - umvi 7y ago
    Careful, people have been known to hire hitmen to get the name they want[1] [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/12/9/21003858/instagram-polo-rossi-lorathio-adams-ii-sentenced-14-years-domain-name-state-snaps https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
    - callumprentice 7y ago
      oof! terrifying.
    - jwilk 7y ago
      Non-AMP link: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003858/instagram-polo-rossi-lorathio-adams-ii-sentenced-14-years-domain-name-state-snaps https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003858/instagram-polo-r...
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Huh. I vaguely recall reading something similar, within the last couple years. Probably on HN, but not for sure. In that case, the victim did temporarily lose a domain. And the exploit involved taking over their email. Maybe use two-factor authentication with a third-party app? I don't know specifics, though.
NhanH 7y ago
A few months ago, someone tried to create a fake account to impersonate my mom. And long story short, somehow we couldn't get 2FA sms token to login again(which I suspect is a bug), then the account was disabled not given a reason. We tried the process to verify it was her account, but after being asked to submit passport photo + her photo, the ticket stops progressing for the past 2 months and it has been very frustrating for us. The account has years of my mom's photo that wasn't backed up elsewhere. If there happens to be any engineer passing by that can escalate this internally, I would be much appreciated. Facebook's "user support" is getting to the point where Google's support is looking like a sane one. At least the automated system works when it is supposed to. I got a couple of really weird behaviors trying to unlock the account: the system asked to select an item from an empty list to send 2FA code. The initial sms 2FA code that we received when the attacker tried to login somehow got wrong encoding data (utf8 vs utf16), which shows up as non sensical Chinese character.
- m463 7y ago
  When these free services are funded by user data, it seems ironic that... "passport photo + her photo"... more data seems to be the currency to get free customer service.
  - hrunt 7y ago
    On the Make Me Smart podcast, Kai Ryssdahl has a saying for this: the solution for Facebook's problems is always more Facebook.
drummer 7y ago
Facebook is just a dumpsterfire at this point,slow burning with occasional intense flares. Best to avoid it.
smelendez 7y ago
I didn't realize Facebook had this policy and I'm curious if other services do. I would have assumed that an incarcerated person could give their credentials to a trusted person outside to manage their account for them and relay information.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  I'm wondering what laws require them to follow this policy.
51Cards 7y ago
I was locked out of my FB account for no reason a couple months back. The option I had was to send myself a text message but after a dozen tries over a couple weeks and never receiving the message I gave up for awhile. I didn't want to upload my ID to some unknown person. 3 weeks later I tried again and this time I got the SMS message and was able to get back in. I took a back up of my account as well just in case.
nucleardog 7y ago
What scares me most about all these stories and personal experience, is it often seems the only way to get these actual issues resolved is to know someone that works at the company, or have enough of a platform on the internet that eventually the cost of the bad PR gets to be enough that someone notices and fixes it. I don't know anyone that works at Facebook/Google/Uber/etc. When I have issues they just go unresolved. Uber Eats double-submitted my order after throwing up a bundle of internal server errors and literally my only recourse at this point is apparently to sue them to get my $26 back. (Which I'm seriously considering -- even if I don't get my $26 back, it will certainly cost them more than $26 just to respond so at least the cosmic accounting will balance out.) It would be really nice if there were companies to give my money to that did have some semblance of customer support that didn't require making friends with the right people or curating a social media following.
- rayhendricks 7y ago
  What about asking for a chargeback if you paid via credit card? I won a chargeback when Uber [Jump] bikes charged me $50 for riding 0.0 miles while the bike was locked. My guess was that their LTE provider was switching between towers right near the top of Capitol Hill [Seattle] and another tower that was not line of sight. So it just ran out the clock until it hit some kind of fail safe at 3hrs or whatever and stopped. Of course there was zero notification that I was still being charged. Hopefully this is now fixed.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    It doesn't have to be a credit card to charge-back, in the UK anyway. It just helps, if it's a larger sum, since your arrangement's with the creditor not whoever 'you' paid. My bank's charged back erroneous debit card charges without any issue a few times.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  There might be a bias that people telling these stories, the ones that make it to your eyes, are more likely to be attached to the journalism and connected community.
bikeshed 7y ago
They were doing you a favour. Stop using Facebook.
Jerry2 7y ago
From TFA: >Fortunately I have some friends and ex-colleagues who work at Facebook so I reached out to them and asked for help, some of whom were kind enough to submit internal support tickets on my behalf. I wasn’t sure that was going to help so I fired off more emails and uploads of my ID but heard nothing. Thankfully 3 days later, I got a very terse email — “We unlocked your account” This is a common refrain that I see in all these FB/Google "locked out or banned" horror stories. Unless you have some friends at high places at FB/Google, you're SOL if you ever get locked out of your FB or Gmail account.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pishpash 7y ago
  Always take out your data, never let it be the only copy on those services.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
foogazi 7y ago
Why the fuck does FB care if a user is incarcerated? What’s next? You’re behind on your car payments or child support? Your credit score is too low...
- pheug 7y ago
  Social credit scores as seen on black mirror
  - pandizzle 7y ago
    And China
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
hansdieter1337 7y ago
Pretty sure the same guy that tries to purchase and guess your password locked your account. It seems to be relatively easy to lock someone’s account since they don’t check. Related: https://bitrebels.com/social/how-to-someones-facebook-shut-down/ https://bitrebels.com/social/how-to-someones-facebook-shut-d...
spookthesunset 7y ago
Yeah. I’m sure this guy was not at all doing something sketchy for Facebook to shut down the account. This is a one-sided view designed to spark outrage from all the people who are like “I don’t even own a Facebook!”. The perfect clickbait for the ultra-paranoid viewer...
awinter-py 7y ago
Allowing insiders to shepherd tickets is a ticking legal time bomb for these companies. Given how bad their dispute resolution is, and the huge dollar value of getting your account back in an emergency, insider support channels are highly valuable. If I were in an AG's office I'd find a case of quid pro quo and research a bribery suit. These companies operate internationally, so there are FCPA implications as well (and I'm not a lawyer)
ajdlinux 7y ago
The author raises the point that his account could have been marked due to fake information submitted via their law enforcement request form. It occurs to me that companies don't run bug bounties and authorised pentesting programs for process flaws - I assume that would be deemed out-of-scope "social engineering" even if it doesn't involve any psychological trickery and just involves uploading a forged official document and seeing if they even try to validate it at all.
VvR-Ox 7y ago
The most important take away for me is: Don't use services like Facebook. Of course now a lot of people will moan when they read this because they think my alternative is living in a hut in the forest but what I want to say is that these companies have that kind of power because we gave it to them by exclusively using their services because it was so convenient when they lured us in. Using other services or even building them on your own is more effort but it could be worth the extra time when I look at scenes like this one.
theqult 7y ago
>I did find a form online at Facebook.com that allows members of law enforcement to report incarcerated users Ehm ehm and why ?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
walterkrankheit 7y ago
I find it weird that Facebook even does this. It's like pile-on in a justice system that's supposedly already dished its punishment. What right does FB have to punish someone for something they did outside of FB? And jesus, have some pity. But the fact that you can 'accidentally' be marked as incarcerated is also really strange.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
randomchars 7y ago
The form that was mentioned in the article: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/564493676910603 https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/564493676910603
Y-Bopinator 7y ago
Sounds like somebody logged into her Facebook account from a jail phone

This culture of not treating people even half-decently frustrates me. Is it so hard to acknowledge that the user is a human?

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
It is. It's very hard, to the point of impossibility, to ensure that not a single one of Facebook's 2.4 billion users will fall into a weird process gap. Other organizations that are smaller by multiple orders of magnitude still regularly fail at it.
- retrac 7y ago
  It's not when the user falls down a weird gap in the architecture that is frustrating and dehumanizing. It's that there's almost never a way to get ahold of a human to explain what's broken. There is apparently no straightforward way to simply contact Facebook support. I'm not sure they even have support.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    The frustrating thing is, if they had a support team, they'd be inundated with really simple questions. A few years ago an article discussing some new Facebook login feature became the top search result for "Facebook login". What happened next? Thousands of comments on that article in the lines of "I want to login to Facebook, why am I seeing this page instead, please give me back my Facebook!". Google started offering an open-to-the-public question and answers on search results, and some people think that's the place to book a restaurant table after googling said restaurant. There's some article that said 90% of computer users are below proficient, they have their routines but get totally lost if something doesn't work... OTOH, having no support isn't the answer either, especially if the issue is actually on their side, and the user is genuinely inconvenienced.
    - sansnomme 7y ago
      Perhaps it is time to charge for advanced support like AWS. If you want priority support for Facebook where stupid questions are entertained and your hand is held, 99 dollars a year. Considering the value of social media these days, it is not too much to ask, especially if you are an enterprise customer. For everyday customers with non-critical problems that can be solved by Namecheap-style support teams in Eastern Europe, 5 dollars a month.
      - nitwit005 7y ago
        If a company like Facebook offered paid support, the press would rush to denounce them for it. It would also probably generate more support scams.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        I don't want support for 99 dollars a year. I'd be happy with $1 a minute or whatever. It's fine to discourage 99% of the support calls normal companies get. Just have something for extreme situations.
        pishpash 7y ago
        And refund if it's their issue, basically a bug bounty with a PEBKAC cost.
      - Nextgrid 7y ago
        Instead of a recurring support plan just charge up-front per ticket, something like 50$ or so. The fee is refunded if the issue is on Facebook's fault. This would solve the issue of monkeys wasting support's time while offering a way to get support for those who know what they're doing and are happy to put their dollars on the line.
        nulbyte 7y ago
        > The fee is refunded if the issue is on Facebook's fault. Does this model actually work? I'm sure there are some reputable companies that could make it work, but I'm not sure I know anyone who would trust Facebook to get this right.
- uberman 7y ago
  I originally just down voted this comment, but I feel it warrants a response rather than a down vote. I removed my down vote so here are my thoughts. Big tech, Google and Facebook in particular don't have "weird process gaps". What they have is a willful ignorance of any and all customer service. They are the vanguard of a new economy devoid of any and all notion of customer service. That quaint notion is too expensive in today's economy. Today, "customer service" is provided via a one way email black hole. The only way anyone gets customer service from any unicorn is either by shaming them in a vial social media post or leveraging an internal contact. There used to be a time where one could call and talk to an actual person who actually worked for the company and might, just might be in a position to help. Those days began to end with the shift to offshore call centers and now have completely vanished thanks to canned email responses. I NEVER in my wildest dreams would have though "I wish Google had an offshore call center to support me". Years ago, while flying British Air from Nairobi to London I had my camera equipment and dress shoes stolen by ground crew. I called up BA and explained that I had watched a person on the tarmac open my bag as it was being loaded onto the plain. I don't even know if the ground crewman was a BA employee or an Airport employee, but the BA rep on the phone told me she was mortified at what had happened and the next day they couriered a check to me. No bickering, no stonewalling, no email voids, just pure customer service. That one great experience was snatched from the jaws of disappointment by a timely customer service rep with the authority to help and has meant that I will fly BA whenever it is possible over all other airline options. Would they do the same today? I doubt it, but they did it once and I will always be a fan as a result.
  - rckoepke 7y ago
    Just 3 years ago BA went above and beyond for me when I left a wallet on a plane, but didn't find out until I was in a different terminal (45 minutes later), and couldn't go back due to security/visa checkpoints. BA sent runners to the plane in the other terminal and they physically carried my wallet with all cards/cash in it to me. I've heard a lot of well-deserved criticism of BA as well, but it does seem like many of their staff are still willing to go above and beyond.
    - teh_klev 7y ago
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  If those gaps are that rare, then how hard could it be to employ a few human beings who are empowered to help the vanishingly-few users who fall through the cracks? Either the gaps are not that rare, or FB doesn't give a shit. There are no other options.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Your intuition for the size of the problem here is off. If "vanishingly few" means that a tenth of a percent fall through some crack each year, that's 2 million cases annually. In practice, I bet Facebook does even better than that, but I would be very surprised if it were a workload that could be handled by just a few extra people.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      You know, when a few million people "fall through the cracks" due to some governmental screw-up, people get really bent out of shape.
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        Do they? They get moderately annoyed, certainly, and they have every right to. But the DMV issues mistaken suspensions all the time, and I don't think many people see that as either a critically important issue or proof that the government is evil.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        I think people do, the idea of being stuck in a bad situation due to a heartless bureaucracy with no way out is something people obsess over, and are disturbed by it happening to even a single person. Have you ever seen "Brazil"? Read something by Kafka? Talked to a (US-style) libertarian or conservative, particularly about the early Soviet Union?
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      Imagine if, say, a tenth of a percent of cars failed to start in the morning. That would be considered a big deal, wouldn't it? Enough to employ people to look into the problem(s) and fix them?
- coffeefirst 7y ago
  That’s true, but look, nobody made them get that big. They worked really hard to make it happen. And good for them, but scale is not a get out of responsibility free card.
- int_19h 7y ago
  If it's "too big to care", then perhaps it should be trimmed down to size? Industries where you have many different companies competing for customers somehow manage to have decent customer support.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  It's very hard, to the point of impossibility, to ensure that not a single one of Facebook's 2.4 billion users will fall into a weird process gap. So Facebook should just admit it doesn't scale, and work on doing things smaller and better. If it was a startup, the HN crowd would be all about "doesn't scale!" But since it's a FAANG, it's, "Sure! Just keep on going and hurting society. Am I vested yet?"
netsharc 7y ago
Or that a human working for FB can make a mistake and put someone else "in jail". No, thought the dev team, this mistake would never happen, the only way to "get out of jail" is to show us your release papers! It's pervasive, isn't it. Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist. What I realized once was, the TSA agent doesn't want or isn't allowed to think and make decisions, because making decisions mean being responsible for those decisions...
- mschuster91 7y ago
  > Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist. Unfortunately, children being used for smuggling stuff or as bombs on legs is nothing new :'( Humans are cruel.
pureagave 7y ago
I’m reminded of the old comic where it shows that Facebook’s users are the product. The advertisers are the only customers. Why should they care to deal with one billionth of their product if it is accidentally marked bad?
- perl4ever 7y ago
  This is something people always repeat, but it's nonsense. Facebook (and similar companies) is a middleman between users and advertisers. Neither party is uniquely a "customer" versus the other, and advertisers have basically the same problem of being a very small part of the business and therefore unimportant and without leverage.
Iv 7y ago
Well the user is the product. Considering it human would interfere with the bottom line.

craigds 7y ago

Why do they even have this process? Who cares if someone in prison uses Facebook? This is pretty absurd.

notatoad 7y ago
yeah, the fact that facebook locks the accounts of people who are currently incarcerated is the most interesting part of this post to me. why is that any of their business?
- nateburke 7y ago
  Maybe they don't want to have, e.g. convicted rapists going on the books as 'liking' ads for paying customers
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    Then they ought to make people agree to a background check before signing up for an account.
  - pell 7y ago
    The way American society treats convicts and ex-convicts is baffling to me. It's as if rehabilitation is not even a pretense anymore.
    - codegladiator 7y ago
      Innocent until proven guilty. Never innocent once proven guilty.
      - pell 7y ago
        I didn't talk about innocence. I am talking about human dignity and rehabilitation.
      - tyingq 7y ago
        The plea bargain system in the US pretty much guarantees a fair amount of convicted people aren't guilty of anything other than making a very tough risk management decision.

badrabbit 7y ago

Curious, is there even a paid alternative to FB?

lwhalen 7y ago
Thinkspot, MeWe, and Mastodon.

mirimir 7y ago

> My best guess though is that it was the same person who seems to be trying to get access to my account with weekly password reset requests and offers to purchase it. Please say more.

callumprentice 7y ago
Not much more to say I am afraid. I get frequent (weekly, sometimes more) emails from Facebook containing password reset instructions "as per my request". At least two people have begged me to give up my account name (just my first name) that I seem to have got years ago - not sure it's even used or relevant anymore. My initial assumption was that if they can't get the account, they would just try and mess it up for me. On reflection it's probably unrelated and just one of those things.. I guess if they're reading this post, I'll find out soon :)
- umvi 7y ago
  Careful, people have been known to hire hitmen to get the name they want[1] [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2019/12/9/21003858/instagram-polo-rossi-lorathio-adams-ii-sentenced-14-years-domain-name-state-snaps https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
  - callumprentice 7y ago
    oof! terrifying.
  - jwilk 7y ago
    Non-AMP link: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003858/instagram-polo-rossi-lorathio-adams-ii-sentenced-14-years-domain-name-state-snaps https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003858/instagram-polo-r...
- mirimir 7y ago
  Huh. I vaguely recall reading something similar, within the last couple years. Probably on HN, but not for sure. In that case, the victim did temporarily lose a domain. And the exploit involved taking over their email. Maybe use two-factor authentication with a third-party app? I don't know specifics, though.

NhanH 7y ago

A few months ago, someone tried to create a fake account to impersonate my mom. And long story short, somehow we couldn't get 2FA sms token to login again(which I suspect is a bug), then the account was disabled not given a reason. We tried the process to verify it was her account, but after being asked to submit passport photo + her photo, the ticket stops progressing for the past 2 months and it has been very frustrating for us. The account has years of my mom's photo that wasn't backed up elsewhere. If there happens to be any engineer passing by that can escalate this internally, I would be much appreciated. Facebook's "user support" is getting to the point where Google's support is looking like a sane one. At least the automated system works when it is supposed to. I got a couple of really weird behaviors trying to unlock the account: the system asked to select an item from an empty list to send 2FA code. The initial sms 2FA code that we received when the attacker tried to login somehow got wrong encoding data (utf8 vs utf16), which shows up as non sensical Chinese character.

m463 7y ago
When these free services are funded by user data, it seems ironic that... "passport photo + her photo"... more data seems to be the currency to get free customer service.
- hrunt 7y ago
  On the Make Me Smart podcast, Kai Ryssdahl has a saying for this: the solution for Facebook's problems is always more Facebook.

drummer 7y ago

Facebook is just a dumpsterfire at this point,slow burning with occasional intense flares. Best to avoid it.

smelendez 7y ago

I didn't realize Facebook had this policy and I'm curious if other services do. I would have assumed that an incarcerated person could give their credentials to a trusted person outside to manage their account for them and relay information.

AlexCoventry 7y ago
I'm wondering what laws require them to follow this policy.

51Cards 7y ago

I was locked out of my FB account for no reason a couple months back. The option I had was to send myself a text message but after a dozen tries over a couple weeks and never receiving the message I gave up for awhile. I didn't want to upload my ID to some unknown person. 3 weeks later I tried again and this time I got the SMS message and was able to get back in. I took a back up of my account as well just in case.

nucleardog 7y ago

What scares me most about all these stories and personal experience, is it often seems the only way to get these actual issues resolved is to know someone that works at the company, or have enough of a platform on the internet that eventually the cost of the bad PR gets to be enough that someone notices and fixes it. I don't know anyone that works at Facebook/Google/Uber/etc. When I have issues they just go unresolved. Uber Eats double-submitted my order after throwing up a bundle of internal server errors and literally my only recourse at this point is apparently to sue them to get my $26 back. (Which I'm seriously considering -- even if I don't get my $26 back, it will certainly cost them more than $26 just to respond so at least the cosmic accounting will balance out.) It would be really nice if there were companies to give my money to that did have some semblance of customer support that didn't require making friends with the right people or curating a social media following.

rayhendricks 7y ago
What about asking for a chargeback if you paid via credit card? I won a chargeback when Uber [Jump] bikes charged me $50 for riding 0.0 miles while the bike was locked. My guess was that their LTE provider was switching between towers right near the top of Capitol Hill [Seattle] and another tower that was not line of sight. So it just ran out the clock until it hit some kind of fail safe at 3hrs or whatever and stopped. Of course there was zero notification that I was still being charged. Hopefully this is now fixed.
- OJFord 7y ago
  It doesn't have to be a credit card to charge-back, in the UK anyway. It just helps, if it's a larger sum, since your arrangement's with the creditor not whoever 'you' paid. My bank's charged back erroneous debit card charges without any issue a few times.
Waterluvian 7y ago
There might be a bias that people telling these stories, the ones that make it to your eyes, are more likely to be attached to the journalism and connected community.

bikeshed 7y ago

They were doing you a favour. Stop using Facebook.

Jerry2 7y ago

From TFA: >Fortunately I have some friends and ex-colleagues who work at Facebook so I reached out to them and asked for help, some of whom were kind enough to submit internal support tickets on my behalf. I wasn’t sure that was going to help so I fired off more emails and uploads of my ID but heard nothing. Thankfully 3 days later, I got a very terse email — “We unlocked your account” This is a common refrain that I see in all these FB/Google "locked out or banned" horror stories. Unless you have some friends at high places at FB/Google, you're SOL if you ever get locked out of your FB or Gmail account.

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pishpash 7y ago
Always take out your data, never let it be the only copy on those services.
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foogazi 7y ago

Why the fuck does FB care if a user is incarcerated? What’s next? You’re behind on your car payments or child support? Your credit score is too low...

pheug 7y ago
Social credit scores as seen on black mirror
- pandizzle 7y ago
  And China
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hansdieter1337 7y ago

Pretty sure the same guy that tries to purchase and guess your password locked your account. It seems to be relatively easy to lock someone’s account since they don’t check. Related: https://bitrebels.com/social/how-to-someones-facebook-shut-down/ https://bitrebels.com/social/how-to-someones-facebook-shut-d...

spookthesunset 7y ago

Yeah. I’m sure this guy was not at all doing something sketchy for Facebook to shut down the account. This is a one-sided view designed to spark outrage from all the people who are like “I don’t even own a Facebook!”. The perfect clickbait for the ultra-paranoid viewer...

awinter-py 7y ago

Allowing insiders to shepherd tickets is a ticking legal time bomb for these companies. Given how bad their dispute resolution is, and the huge dollar value of getting your account back in an emergency, insider support channels are highly valuable. If I were in an AG's office I'd find a case of quid pro quo and research a bribery suit. These companies operate internationally, so there are FCPA implications as well (and I'm not a lawyer)

ajdlinux 7y ago

The author raises the point that his account could have been marked due to fake information submitted via their law enforcement request form. It occurs to me that companies don't run bug bounties and authorised pentesting programs for process flaws - I assume that would be deemed out-of-scope "social engineering" even if it doesn't involve any psychological trickery and just involves uploading a forged official document and seeing if they even try to validate it at all.

VvR-Ox 7y ago

The most important take away for me is: Don't use services like Facebook. Of course now a lot of people will moan when they read this because they think my alternative is living in a hut in the forest but what I want to say is that these companies have that kind of power because we gave it to them by exclusively using their services because it was so convenient when they lured us in. Using other services or even building them on your own is more effort but it could be worth the extra time when I look at scenes like this one.

theqult 7y ago

>I did find a form online at Facebook.com that allows members of law enforcement to report incarcerated users Ehm ehm and why ?

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walterkrankheit 7y ago

I find it weird that Facebook even does this. It's like pile-on in a justice system that's supposedly already dished its punishment. What right does FB have to punish someone for something they did outside of FB? And jesus, have some pity. But the fact that you can 'accidentally' be marked as incarcerated is also really strange.

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randomchars 7y ago

The form that was mentioned in the article: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/564493676910603 https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/564493676910603

Y-Bopinator 7y ago

Sounds like somebody logged into her Facebook account from a jail phone