16 ms·

Tell HN: Instagram demands I send a picture of myself to prove I own my account

332 points by jdthedisciple 4y ago

So I tried to create an Instagram account yesterday. After registering, I was immediately told my account was disabled for suspicious activity, but that if I wished they would review it within 24 hours. Weird, I thought, but maybe it's just some rare false positive that can be triggered and I'm just unlucky. So I waited, patiently. After 24 hours I tried to log in again and to my surprise, my account wasn't just temporarily disabled anymore but permanently deactivated and I was met with this message: > Your account has been disabled for violating our terms. Learn how you may be able to restore your account. https://help.instagram.com/521372114683554 https://help.instagram.com/521372114683554 How can I allegedly have broken Instagram terms when I just created the account and even verified it by phone? So I visited that link and asked them to restore it. What I get is an email by facebook that demands I send them a picture of myself holding a paper that I wrote a specific code on. Verbatim the email is this: > Hello, thank you for contacting us. Before we can help you, you must confirm that you are the owner of the account. Please respond to this email and attach a photograph of yourself, where you hold a piece of paper with the following, handwritten code on it: *** Please make sure that the photo fulfills the following criteria: - shows the above mentioned, handwritten code on a clean piece of paper, followed by your full name and username - shows both of your hands holding the paper as well as your complete face - it is well-lit and not too small, dark or blurred - is attached as a JPEG-file to your response E-Mail Note: Even if this account does not contain and pictures of yourself or it represents somebody or something else, we can only help you when we receive a picture of you which fulfills these criteria. Am I the only one who finds this incredibly intrusive? I know I might be partially beating a dead horse here, as everyone knows Meta is pure evil. But this email really "gave me the rest". I wouldn't use IG for posting pictures of myself anyway but now I won't ever be using anything from Meta even for business reasons. Are there really no less intrusive ways than the above to prove ones ownership of account?? Why is email and phone verification not enough anymore these days? Is this the type of "progress" happening at FAANG? LOL

reaperducer 4y ago
handwritten code on a clean piece of paper, followed by your full name and username - shows both of your hands holding the paper This is how Instagram finds out that I have only one finger on each hand. The middle ones.
lizardactivist 4y ago
I can't even complete registration of an account there. Despite never visiting or using the service, it says it has detected suspicious activity from my private, single-user residential IP number. But fewer Instagram accounts in this world is probably a good thing.
dk79XuL9 4y ago
They won't do anything after you've sent a selfie anyway. Same thing happened to me. They'll ignore all of your contact attempts. IG support is pretty much non-existent.
- andrew_ 4y ago
  They also won't act on trademark claims until a suit is filed. Been down that rabbit hole too.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    D̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶l̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶a̶b̶i̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶t̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶D̶M̶C̶A̶?̶ edit: whoops, I misread the parent. I swear I know the difference between various IP types!
    - kelnos 4y ago
      The DMCA covers copyright violations, not trademark.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      I don't think DMCA touches trademark. And depending on what you mean by "lose liability protections" for ignoring valid takedowns, I'm pretty sure that applies to the specific item and they don't stop being a safe harbor in general.
- BlueGh0st 4y ago
  Same here. I was fairly active on my Instagram and used it directly from the app on my phone. One day, while using the search function, I suddenly got locked out. I sent in the selfie and haven't heard back in over 6 months.
- MaximilianKohlr 4y ago
  I read this article https://www.followchain.org/account-disabled-violating-terms-instagram/ https://www.followchain.org/account-disabled-violating-terms... saying you may need to do it multiple times. I finally relinquished and did it 3 times. No response at all. This is such BS.
foepys 4y ago
It seems that we are only one step away from "verified by Ancestry.com".
gus_massa 4y ago
My wife had to send a photo of herself, her ID, herself, her ID, herself, her ID, and after the third of fourth cycle, her account was marked as legit. I only can wish you good look against whatever "algorithm" they are using.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  One of those stupid dating apps has decided that I am not myself and I cannot upload pictures of myself because it's not me.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  so we're at the point where the steps to prove you're human are so arduous only a bot will have the patience to create a new account someone should try using "photograph of yourself, where you hold a piece of paper with the following, handwritten code on it: **" as a prompt on DALL-E/imagen
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    Dall-E and its relatives are still pretty awful at text, at least for now. They have a decent idea of how individual letters are shaped, but trying to produce a specific word or phrase is generally pretty hopeless. Dall-E can sometimes correctly reproduce words that appear frequently in its training data, like "PIZZA", but its success rate on less common words is dismally low, especially when they're appearing out of context. Some pretty convincing examples of this behavior can be seen at: https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1531624303770279937 https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1531624303770279937
    - adastra22 4y ago
      Because they haven't been trained on that. Yet.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Modern captchas have gotten really annoying, too. You used to be able to just effortlessly type characters from a distorted image in 5 seconds, but now proving that you're an actual real human is so much work I'm tempted to automate it.
openknot 4y ago
Not to defend the practice (because your case is a false positive for a new account), but rather to speculate on why your account was banned, it's likely due to an increase in impersonation on Instagram recently. In other words, some accounts steal the pictures of real people and then send follow requests to friends, and try to get them to tap on links that can give the bad actor access to the friends' accounts or buy cryptocurrencies. It's been spiking recently over the past couple of months (one case in a Canadian news article at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/instagram-photos-stolen-scam-1.6464240 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/instagram-photos-sto...), with other prominent cases documented in the past (2019: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/how-i-stopped-someone-impersonating-me-on-instagram.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/how-i-stopped-someone-impers... and 2021: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/instagram-accounts-created-with-stolen-pics-push-bogus-crypto-schemes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/instagram-accounts-created-w...). Bleeping Computer published a deeper article on the most recent ongoing spike (describing the crypto and Onlyfans scams): https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/instagrams-dark-side-sexual-harassers-crypto-scammers-id-thieves/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/instagrams-da... This doesn't justify at all the permanent deactivation of your completely new account, but just for curiosity's sake, I speculate that this is the reason your new account was banned (overly high security sensitivity on Instagram's end, due to a recent spike in false accounts that impersonate real people, to encourage others to buy cryptocurrency and/or click malicious links).
- kube-system 4y ago
  This particular scheme has been a ridiculous plague among my circle of friends on instagram recently. People create accounts mimicking an existing user, add an underscore at the end of the username, and then spam follow requests to all of their connections. Most people get a notification from someone they know, and they accept it without even thinking about. It is insanely effective. Reporting the accounts for impersonation seem to do nothing, instagram's responses to the support requests even say they don't have enough people to look at all of them, and so they didn't.
  - openknot 4y ago
klyrs 4y ago
ADA lawsuit opportunity here for anybody without two hands...
hansword 4y ago
Simple rule: Don't use meta products. Shame everyone who attempts to copy their business practices.
- xtracto 4y ago
  Right... people should just stop using services that are aggressive. Remember you are the product, unless you pay them. So they dont care about you. Just dont use them. If o go to a restaurant and they let me waiting standing up more than 20 minutes, I'll just go somewhere else. Why do people treat internet websites any different? (You dont lose anything for not having Meta)
  - ls15 4y ago
    > If o go to a restaurant and they let me waiting standing up more than 20 minutes, I'll just go somewhere else. Why do people treat internet websites any different? What if that restaurant is the one where all your friends and family are waiting for you? Somehow over the last couple of years, your friends and family just gave up on all the other restaurants and only gather in this restaurant, even though everyone agrees that the food isn't very good, but out of convenience everyone settled for this one (and for the promotions that they had in earlier days). Actually many of the other restaurants closed because of these network effects and the owner of the famous restaurant got rich and arrogant, but now that everyone goes to this restaurant, it is hard to convince people to try something else.
    - allarm 4y ago
      It is a weak argument imo. If you’re important to them they will follow. If not, there’s no point to keep in touch. I understand that there’s edge cases when it’s really difficult to switch or use an alternative platform (i.e. because of age), but overall it’s not that hard. At least it wasn’t in my case. And yeah, it is possible to eat in multiple restaurants at the same time, when it comes to social platforms.
      - ls15 4y ago
oblib 4y ago
I went to the Instagram sign-up page and filled out some info and submitted it and then decided not to submit whatever it was they were asking for next. Since then when I click on a link to an Instagram post shared on FB they blocked me and demand I set up an account. But if I use a different web browser I can view those posts. I rarely do that though. I just cannot give them the hit.
dylan604 4y ago
Sadly, for a side hustle, an Insta account is seemingly in my future. For someone like me that has never had an Insta account nor have I logged into my FB account for over 8 years, how does one create an account without this happening? Also, these kinds of stories fit well within the narrative of Meta === EvilCorp#1, but I always feel like there's a lot more going on than what is being told in these Ask HN/Tweets/etc. Like, how many accounts were attempted to be made in what time period coming from the same device/IP address/etc? Are the algos at Meta/FB/Insta so bad that legit users are honestly getting flagged like this?
- openknot 4y ago
  >"For someone like me that has never had an Insta account nor have I logged into my FB account for over 8 years, how does one create an account without this happening?" This is speculative, but probably try to recover your Facebook account first (because it's already verified), and then choose the option to try and create an Instagram account based on your logged-in Facebook account. I haven't tried this in practice as I haven't created a new account in a long time, so there's no guarantee this will work. If it doesn't, then unfortunately you would have to block off time to persistently follow the instructions as closely as you can (sending your photo and a note), likely over several days to create the account.
dmitrygr 4y ago
Look at it from their viewpoint. It is hard to do what they do. How else would they collect sellable info on you, without your assistance?
donmcronald 4y ago
> Even if this account does not contain and pictures of yourself or it represents somebody or something else, we can only help you when we receive a picture of you which fulfills these criteria. That's the part that makes me wonder what they're trying to accomplish. I had the same thing happen in 2019, so it's been going on for a long time. For me it happened with a handle that matches a decent .com domain I own when I was going around and registering accounts at every site I could think of (ie: brand protection). As far as I'm concerned they got nothing that helps them determine whether or not I'm going to use the account for legitimate purposes. I also did not violate their terms of service because it was a brand new registration. I didn't even get an email. I had to figure out where to send the request to have my account reactivated. I didn't like the idea of sending them a photo, but felt forced into it to make sure no one else could come along and squat on the handle that matches my brand. I don't have trademarks (yet) and, even if I did, claiming someone is violating a trademark is going to be a significant amount of effort vs sending them the photo they want. So, I capitulated even though I have no idea what they're using my photo for. My best guess is that Mark has it framed and hanging in his private art studio. I think there's a good chance that eventually big tech is going to run on massive facial recognition databases that were built against our will. I think Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft should be chopped into about 10 different companies each and the government shouldn't give any consideration to the impact it has on their business. They have no respect for us. We shouldn't have any respect for them IMO.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  > I think there's a good chance that eventually big tech is going to run on massive facial recognition databases that were built against our will. too late - this is an active industry with lots of funding. Further I believe that "metaverse" is an attempt to link that auto-ID to place, with tracking and profiles of all sorts of meat-scale interactions. The calls to boycott "metaverse" in the USA could not come soon enough.
- dogleash 4y ago
  >I think there's a good chance that eventually big tech is going to run on massive facial recognition databases that were built against our will. >eventually Already does. It's just not a bread and butter component of every company's business yet. We're already past the time where, in a few years, people will start pointing back and saying "well, if you don't like it, you should have done something then."
dweekly 4y ago
Sadly, email and phone verification have never been particularly effective methods of proving personhood/identity/non-malevolent intent. Witness the dozens of spam phone calls / pig butchering texts / Gmail-originating spam emails one gets a day. I noticed that after enabling iCloud Private Relay on my phone, I get a _lot_ more CAPTCHAs very suspicious of my activity. This is both annoying and logical; a site's confidence in my existence / non-malevolence is much decreased when I don't appear from a consistent IP and the IPs that I appear from have a non-zero quantity of bad actors from which I must now be disambiguated. This seems a classic example of a challenging problem of balancing privacy (wanting an option to be anonymous in my use of a service, including ones where I can post information or message others) with security (wanting to be sure that my counterparties are real humans unlikely to be malevolent or misrepresenting themselves). Service providers get slammed for errors on both sides. That's not to give up on trying to solve it or suggest that the current status quo is optimal. Going out on a limb here, I could imagine a solution where e.g. Private Relay users had egress from a special set of IPs that indicate to service providers that the originating user had indeed been identified/validated by Apple as authentic. Traffic inbound from these IPs could have a slightly relaxed threat posture. This is roughly in line with what Apple has been trying to do with Login With Apple; not just making it easier for users to sign in but helping reduce automated signups. An ideal component missing here would be a way to backchannel to Apple from a service provider "Hey, user $UID did a Bad Thing just FYI" to allow Apple to better risk-score Apple profiles/activity, obviously weighted by Apple for believability on the part of the service provider.
- soco 4y ago
  What you propose there could be built on the basis of identity federation, right?
  - dweekly 4y ago
    In theory, yes, and ideally any of this would be implemented as a standard, for instance as a segment of a TLS ClientHello added by a forwarding proxy (such as Private Relay) that includes a UUID connection identifier, a risk category for the user, the identity of the proxy, and the proxy's signature for the whole of the ClientHello packet. There would then also be presumably a way to interrogate a proxy for reporting back bad actions of a user by a service provider, with those attestations also signed by the service provider. (FLAGGED_AS_BOT, CHILD_PORN_TAKEDOWN, FINANCIAL_FRAUD, SPAMMING, OTHER_TOS_VIOLATION, etc) The service provider would pass in the UUID connection identifier which the proxy could then map back to the known user, weighted by the degree to which the proxy trusts the service provider's reports.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gtourist 4y ago
I have a rule of only ever using Edge on Windows with no plugins (does Edge even have that?) when interacting with Google or Amazon account services, to avoid this "your account has been locked due to suspicious activity" nonsense, knowing that it only results in a hopeless black hole of canned email responses asking for information to unlock the account, only for it to remain locked after said information is provided. When using your accounts, never use Firefox, since it's down to like 2% marketshare, and automatically suspicious, and never use privacy-oriented plugins like uBlock, which suspiciously alter how and how much your browser communicates with these sites. Also never buy anything online late at night (like after 1 AM). Apparently that's suspicious, since a lot of fraudsters are international. It's incredible that these shitty ML hueristic systems are the best these "genius" FAANG developers, who get paid $150-300k a year, can come up with up. I love it when they or their loved ones get ensnared by these systems, like the Googler who threw a Twittertantrum when they locked his and his husband's Google Photos (or whatever they call it) account for "suspicious activity," and they lost thousands of photos. Pure lifefuel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357
- donmcronald 4y ago
  > It's incredible that these shitty ML hueristic systems are the best these "genius" FAANG developers, who get paid $150-300k a year, can come up with up. I think it gets personalized / fingerprinted fairly quickly TBH. For example, I have 2 identical (Linux + Firefox + uBlock Origin) VMs that I use over the same VPN connection. One of them gets almost no captcha challenges and the other gets them continuously. My subjective experience is that it's based on what you're searching for on Google or maybe due to hitting sites that Google might have flagged as malicious (guilt by association). It's tough to tell, but it sure feels like there's some type of cumulative score based on activity.
swasheck 4y ago
this happened to both me and my wife. never heard back. account remains unavailable. multiple follow ups went to black holes.
- izzydata 4y ago
  Do they even want users? What is their motive?
givemeethekeys 4y ago
You want a free account? Bend over. You want to host your own photos and share with your friends? Go ahead and figure it out on your own. Or build a better Instagram.
- fsflover 4y ago
  > Or build a better Instagram. https://fediverse.party/en/pixelfed/ https://fediverse.party/en/pixelfed/
annadane 4y ago
Zuckerberg is a problem. He exists only to buy out everyone else and will not stop until everybody is destroyed
izzydata 4y ago
I highly dislike this forced real identity thing on the internet. What is the problem with using internet aliases to post internet stuff in a manner entirely unrelated to your personal life?
- ghaff 4y ago
  Because, while extremely imperfect, making a modicum of effort to make sure someone is a real person still screens out a lot of bots and anonymous scammers--which is at least a start.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    While completely destroying a core benefit of the internet.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Anonymity was not really considered a core benefit of the early Internet. In fact, early Internet users typically had true names associated with universities, companies, and the government.
      - adastra22 4y ago
        If you define "Internet" to be email and such, yes. But as soon as the World Wide Web went mainstream in the mid 90's, being pseudonymous while online was very much a core principle of the internet. "No one knows you're a dog on the internet" was a common saying.
        JCharante 4y ago
        nothing stopping you from chilling in IRC or mastadon it's just the normie networks that want real names
  - stazz1 4y ago
    Disagree, i think it's so you can find your friends.
Animats 4y ago
Papers, please. Glory to Arstotzka! Cause no trouble.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  For the curious https://youtu.be/8XcyZ-ls9_Y https://youtu.be/8XcyZ-ls9_Y
- contingencies 4y ago
  Yesterday I had a consultant locked down in one of these Chinese zero-economy policy snap lockdowns. Hordes of special police came to enforce the lockdown which is ongoing. His hotel was right at the edge. After some suitable wangling he was able to obtain a special paper from a petty official to leave the quarantine zone. Returning in the evening, split lovers could be seen smooching over the quarantine fence. Nobody gave a damn. We expect it to last three days then return to normal.
dorkwood 4y ago
Be thankful that they've given you a way to restore your account. They didn't to me. I suspect I was supposed to be thrown into the same verification pipeline as you, but something got messed up along the way and now I have a completely unresponsive app (black screen with a refresh button that does nothing) with no instructions on how to fix it. I thought maybe it was some weird Android bug, so I bought an iPhone and logged in on that only to find that it is also unresponsive. I just want to delete the account at this point, but I can't, since trying to access the deletion link returns an error telling me to open the (unresponsive) app to regain access to my account. I've contacted a lawyer who works in the field, since I'm pretty sure preventing me from deleting my account is a violation of their TOS. Who knows if that will go anywhere. I'm kind of at my wit's end here. If anyone has any better ideas, I'm all ears.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > I've contacted a lawyer who works in the field, since I'm pretty sure preventing me from deleting my account is a violation of their TOS If you're in the EU, it's also a violation of "the right to be forgotten" and you can contact your ICO.
LegitShady 4y ago
I made a twitter account, followed a few accounts, and then it was locked and twitter demanded I send them a scan of my government issued ID to prove I was a real person. I decided twitter wasn't worth that kind of identity theft risk. Same thing this happening with instagram - I'm not sure why anyone would want to volunteer this information to these companies whose whole finance model is abusing your personal information. I personally don't think any of these social media companies are worth sending pictures or ID to.
fritigern 4y ago
We should stop using Instagram or any Facebook service.
jsnell 4y ago
> How can I allegedly have broken Instagram terms when I just created the account and even verified it by phone? Your account appears, for whatever reason, bulk-created. For example maybe you were creating it from a network that somebody had used for a lot of IG account creation, or you created it with Firefox on Linux and 99% of their Firefox+Linux registrations are from spammers since it's easy to automate and run on a cloud server, etc. It's actually pretty friendly from them to notify you immediately, rather than wait until you have gotten attached to the account. > Are there really no less intrusive ways than the above to prove ones ownership of account?? Your ownership of the account is obviously not really under question. It's a freshly created account, it can't possibly have been hijacked yet. But is it your first account or the thousandth? Email addresses can be minted for free. Phone numbers for pennies. Since phone-verified, US-IP Instagram accounts seem to be selling for about $7 in bulk, those pennies are not much of an obstacle. But it's pretty hard for you to get selfies from a lot of people in an automated way. (Sure, you could go to a parking lot and pay people to do the selfie for you. But that's a much higher bar.) And then if suspicion remains, it allows IG to ask for either a second selfie or a picture of a government ID, and verify that your identity has actually stayed stable.
- sbf501 4y ago
  > from a network that somebody had used for a lot side note: I still can't edit wikipedia because my block of IP addresses has been banned for some reason. I just moved to a new house and can only edit if I go to a coffee shop!
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    Normally you can make an account while on a non-blocked IP, then use that account on the blocked-IP.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Same here. Not my IP but a whole IP ranges probably spanning almost the whole country.
- grishka 4y ago
ergonaught 4y ago
I had a similar experience creating a FB account. Before I could even fully log in, it was suspended for violating whatever.
fleddr 4y ago
Your experience sucks but it's too simplistic to consider this malice/evil. I think none of us fully understand the extreme levels of abuse a service like Insta (and several other services) have to deal with. It's abuse at scale and ever-changing, hence an endless cat and mouse game where non-transparent heuristics create false positives. By the way, your method of verification (holding up a sign) is also common at porn sites. That's what my friend told me anyway.
kka_dev 4y ago
Bit similar happened to me. I had account for about 3 years, posted like once a month, followed friends and some celebs - nothing out of ordinary. Then some day I was greeted via form that I needed to give my birthday as I apparently had not done that yet. I just threw in random date as I thought it is none of their business. Well turns out now that due to me "being under 13" my account is marked for deletion and I have 30 days to appeal with similar requirement. I tried to write them but got automated response. Ended up losing my IG account and learned valuable lesson that if I am not in control of my data I am not calling the shots either.
kazinator 4y ago
> "photograph of yourself, where you hold a piece of paper with the following, handwritten code on it" Wow, these people sure know how to write nice prompts for AI-driven image generation!
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Current AI image generators cannot repeat text you provide to them. But this request seems like it's pretty vulnerable to a template photo of a person holding a piece of paper, where you'd edit the photo to overlay a photo of paper on which you've written the code.
3327 4y ago
acaloiar 4y ago
In a somewhat related response to your question: "Is this the type of "progress" happening at FAANG?" I recently had a similar experience with Robinhood. I found that if you use their "Logout all devices" feature, you have to re-verify your account with them. They allow you to deposit and place trades, but as soon as you attempt a withdrawal, they notify you that you have to re-verify your identity with them. After two weeks and three denied attempts to verify my identity, I got the SEC involved. Within minutes of the SEC notifying me that they contacted Robinhood on my behalf, my account was verified without further action from me. I withdrew all funds, closed all positions, and deactivated the account out of principle. It shouldn't take SEC action to get access to your funds. And Robinhood shouldn't notify their users that identity verification is required only when a withdrawal is attempted. Robinhood obviously isn't FAANG, but apparently this is the progress in tech more generally.
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  Robinhood is required by regulation to KYC their new account holders. Which typically is accomplished via doc auth. This is applicable to all financial service companies, in the US at least.
  - acaloiar 4y ago
    I'm familiar with KYC. KYC is actually the very reason why Robinhood customers should not be required to re-verify their identity because it stipulates that institutions both acquire and retain the identity information of their customers. With that said, my qualms are not with the fact that I had to re-verify; simply the manner in which it happened. The fact that they re-requested my identity tells you that this verification process was not in support of their KYC obligation, but likely a fraud-prevention mechanism. Which puts the manner in which it happened entirely within their control from a product perspective.
  - malux85 4y ago
    So KYC them when you onboard them, NOT when they try to withdraw. “Oh no, that might hurt our signup and trading figures?! “ Well, DUH, but anything to fudge the numbers right?! Maybe if they make withdrawals even more difficult a percentage of users will abandon and then our assets under management numbers look better. This is exactly what’s happening, stop forgiving the dark pattern behaviour under the guise of compliance.
djsamseng 4y ago
A possible solution? Would love to hear any feedback - please shoot this down with any flaws you find! What if we had a centralized certificate authority that verified a person? Imagine you walk up to the DMV and get a private key (password). When you go to a website you generate a public key and send it to the website you visit. That website uses the public key it received to send a message to the certificate authority to verify you (true/false). Now Instagram knows you are real, but are you faking? I claim to be "First Last" to Instagram. Instagram encrypts "First Last" using the public key and sends it to the certificate authority. If the certificate authority is able to decode "First Last" using the private key then it returns (true/false). Could we extend this to solve user privacy? What if users said "Track me all you want as long as you don't know who I am". Websites can still serve targeted ads but users get the privacy that you are incognito. Instagram now knows your name but they also want to be able to identify you across the internet. So Instagram could also ask the certificate authority for a "personId" that identifies the person across the internet. But now you say, wait now Instagram knows my name and all my activity through my "personId". This is where the Engineers come in. We would have to make any code or action that connects "personId" to a human _illegal_. You write the code, you go to jail. This burden would only fall on websites that ask for someone's human identifiers (name, address, common geolocations, etc.). But that code isn't needed anyway! There is no reason to store "personId" and "First Last" together because you can always get a "personId" when the user gives the public key to the website. So if someone ever writes that code / uses that data query it's punishable by law. So now we have 1. Every website knows it's users are real 2. Every website can know a user is who they say they are 3. Every website can track unique visitors and their internet activity (while not knowing who they actually are) 4. Every user is completely "anonymous". Yes the information could get out, but only temporarily because any code (even a news article or blog) that contains this connection is illegal.
- gjs278 4y ago
- smsm42 4y ago
  > Imagine you walk up to the DMV and get a private key (password). So, the government has control over your identity. If it wants to shut you down, it would just refuse to verify your certificate. And you'd instantly lose access to every website, bank account, phone number, etc. you had. The government would also automatically know every time you create any account anywhere - as they get a ping on their auth services. Does you trust in the government extend this far? Fo you have any politician you do not trust? Imagine he or she becomes in control of the system. Are you still OK with the government controlling the keys to your life? Ok, let's assume it does. What happens when (note, I do not say if) somebody unauthorized gets access to the keys stored at the DMV? They'd be able to fake any identity the want to. And the only way to fix it is to force everybody (hundreds of millions of people) to re-certify. Imagine how well will that go. > Track me all you want as long as you don't know who I am There's massive body of research that indicates unless you take special measures, like injecting noise into the system, tracking can lead to identification in a very short time. Just think about it - tracking will immediately tell where you live, where you work, where you shop, which businesses you patronize, which music do you listen to, etc. etc. - how many people have exactly the same profile as you do? Likely not many. Now if at any point connected to your profile any piece of your identity leaks out - your anonymity is gone forever.
hk1337 4y ago
It’s silly since it’s a brand new account, what do they have to compare it to to confirm it’s you?
aeyes 4y ago
This happened to me multiple times on Facebook when trying to open new accounts to view some walled garden content, each time I used a different mail address on a domain I control in an incognito browser session. The accounts would just get blocked after a day. On the last attempt I thought that I should feed the ML model with more data so I liked some pages and posted some random stuff to the profile. The account still works without any further activity besides using it to view content once very couple of moons. I came to the conclusion that creating an account and not immediately using it is a ban. Just another reason to not use these platforms, they don't even want our business.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  I went a different way. I bought 10 facebook accounts from a web site that specializes in that stuff. Each worked for some time, but eventually after a year all got banned. I didn't post anything, just visited neighborhood forums.
atum47 4y ago
Is like they trying to get people to delete their account at this point. My feed only shows pictures of people that I don't know https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31755825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31755825
cma 4y ago
By normalizing this, scammers may start impersonating Meta and easily convincing people to send them a photo holding their license etc. and maybe even trick them into holding up a social security card.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CosmicShadow 4y ago
I opened a business account and had this happen instantly. It asked for my age, which as a company was 1, so I put that and it instabanned me for being underage. It also didn't help that the website signup didn't work well and lastpass kept trying to autolog me in every step of the way making me look like a spam bot. I had to send the same pic of me holding license thing, it was intrusive. It took a few weeks to get through and eventually the replies just started coming back in Bangladeshi, and I could tell from the signatures where the support was taking place (as if the translate wasn't enough). I have an account now, but what a bullshit experience. Why not be more clear on requirements (i.e. age) and not even allow someone to put 1?
KajMagnus 4y ago
What's happening to Meta/Facebook and Instagram? Are they destroying themselves from inside, when they cannot get their stuff together enough to fix their bugs preventing new people from joining? My years old Instagram blocked, although I had never posted anything, just looked at other people's posts some years ago. There was an error message about me having violated their terms of service. Although it worked the last time I used it, and thereafter I did nothing for many years. So I tried to create a new account. First I got "Internal Error, try again". And then, (I tried again), after having chosen a password and verified my email (a new address for a new account), there was an error like "Seems you're using an open proxy. If you think this is not the case ... blah blah".
- jotm 4y ago
  They're doing you a favor, just quit that garbage.
uoaei 4y ago
My account was discontinued because I refused to add a phone number, use an adblocker, and access from browser only. Apparently this makes my account look "suspicious".
rdxm 4y ago
dclaw 4y ago
Fuck Facebook. Do not ever use anything they touch. Burn it to the ground.
pingec 4y ago
Similar story here. Some years old IG account, logging in maybe once per month. One day few months ago instagram decided to deactivate my account and wanted my selfie to get it back. I never really used the platform so I'll just stay without.
paranoidrobot 4y ago
This is exactly what happened to me, several years ago. I told them to f-off, I still don't have an Instagram account.
chucky123 4y ago
This is something that happens with google, twitter, meta properties and mostly all major faang companies. They track heaps of information when you signup. They will track your ip, device fingerprint, location and everything else. And they will try to figure out if it matches malicious activities like bot usage, scraping behaviour, etc and if yes, they will block your account. In most cases, they don't even block your account but will play dumb. You will get page loading errors, insta app will say that your content couldn't be loaded, twitter will say that this browser isn't supported, etc.
wallfacer120 4y ago
Remember, you deserve 100% convenience and 100% privacy and 100% security. If you fail to get it, it's because corporations are evil and society has failed you.
LeonB 4y ago
An Instagram customer being asked to take a selfie seems like a very effective and non-intrusive method in this specific context.
radamba 4y ago
Airbnb, in Canada, requires your driver's license number or passport number to set up an account, despite their ToS saying they just need your name and address... So not just FAANG...
aasasd 4y ago
Since they're asking for a picture anyway, send them the middle finger holding the goatse photo. Just to make sure you won't use the service by accident in the future. BTW, funny how half of HN hate FB, Google and Amazon, and the other half literally dream of working there.
z9znz 4y ago
> After registering, I was immediately told my account was disabled for suspicious activity > Your account has been disabled for violating our terms I have experienced that same process on Facebook, with the same wording. However, I was never able to get anything after that. In my case, I had deleted my facebook account a few years prior, and finally I was reluctantly making it again since I really needed access to a particular travel/region group. What really blew my mind is that I had only gotten to do the very first step of account creation. I had not reached the point where I could have done or written (or posted or uploaded) anything objectionable. In essence, I "violated" their terms merely by signing up. Basically, their sh*t is broken and deeply flawed, likely unintentionally but possibly _also_ intentionally.
anonymousiam 4y ago
This is a common tactic by Facebook. They tried it on me a little over five years ago and I did not comply. After resetting my password via the verified email account, I got this: "Hi, Your Facebook account is temporarily locked as a security precaution. Here's how you can get back in: 1. Try logging into your account and completing the recovery steps from a computer or mobile phone you’ve previously used to log into Facebook. You can start the recovery process here: https://www.facebook.com/recover/initiate https://www.facebook.com/recover/initiate 2. If you're still having trouble regaining access to your account, please reply to this email and attach a certificate of incorporation or other proof of the legitimacy of your business, such as a: - Utility bill - Local business license (issued by your city, county, state, etc.) - Tax filing - Certificate of Formation (for a partnership) - Articles of Incorporation (for a corporation) Note: Your name must be on the document you submit. If you haven't already, please also attach a copy of your personal ID. You can review what types of ID we accept and how to send your attachments over a secure connection here: https://www.facebook.com/help/183256078471165/?ref=cr Please note that we can't process your request until you provide ID that meets these requirements. In the meantime, your account will remain hidden on the site as a safeguard. Thanks, The Facebook Team" Thereafter I was getting weekly email reminders: "It looks like the information on xxx is inaccurate or out of date. Please verify the the information below for accuracy. If we don't hear from you by (two weeks), the information in question will be automatically updated." That went on for over two years, and then the message changed to "Weekly Facebook Page update for xxx" So it seems that Facebook will lock you out of your account if you delete their cookies from your browser and reset your password via email. They've decided that the email address they've already verified is insufficient proof of your identity, so they want you to send them a gold mine of PII to get back on. No thanks.
processing 4y ago
Not surprised. Meta/Facebook are making it really hard to use their platform nowadays. Why is this? I run or should I say I ran several Facebook pages with large audiences. I've verified my identity numerous times yet again and again I get a notice saying I can't post as I'm not authorized to post to large audiences (all pages I built from scratch). I DM support and they tell me to "check my browser" then spend 30 mins chatting to get to the problem and they can't offer any help. The funny thing is I can still post Ads for these pages but not post anything "organic". The platform has become annoying and very tiring to use.
HiroshiSan 4y ago
Thanks for the write up here’s my experience posted 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962588 The worst part about it is not the deactivation itself but the fact that you can’t get support until you give them what they want otherwise they refuse to help. How that’s an okay business practice is beyond me.
max51 4y ago
I have had the same problem as you. All I want is the possibility to view other people's posts and zoom on the pictures. The part I never saw discussed anywhere is how the f()ck was Instagram planning to "verify " my identity with a picture when I never uploaded anything?! What are they gonna compare the picture to? I personally gave up on it and just bought an account online. I don't know how they did it but the companies selling accounts to failed influencers apparently figured out how to make them look legit. No clue how they do it because even linking my real cell number got me blocked in less than a week (I have had this number since before fakebook was founded btw) Also, what the point of being so aggressive about verifying the accounts of people who don't post/comment/like anything and only view a handful of posts per day? I would understand it if viewing posts was possible without an account, but that's no longer the case. They force you to make an account just to view public posts.
- sha-3 4y ago
  > All I want is the possibility to view other people's posts and zoom on the pictures. Check out Bibliogram[0], an alternate front-end for Instagram. Most of their instances[1] are partially blocked, but you can still view the recent posts and zoom in on them. [0]: https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram-docs/tree/master/docs/Instances.md https://git.sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram-docs/tree/master/docs/...
safety1st 4y ago
I was also permanently banned from Instagram a few months ago. I received the same email and sent them my photo. Never heard back. No idea what the reason for the ban was. I had never posted anything, had followed a few dozen people and would check out their posts occasionally. Who knows? The IG account was linked to my FB account which I've been a more active user of for over a decade. This pretty much ended my desire to interact with FB since who knows if a mystery ban is on the way for that account too. Zuck had a good run /shrug
SoftTalker 4y ago
This is the sort of situation where I would be tempted to send a photo of my genitalia, with the written code.
throwaway2056 4y ago
SOLUTION: After quite some frustration I found a solution for IG/FB. I believe they know from onboarding processes what type of user is passive and the ones that will be CRAZY active. They do not want these passive users - no benefit. Try this: 1. A old android/iPhone 2. Dump about 50 contacts (you may google for VCF) 3. Open all sorts of yellow press - from dailymail to tmz etc. Make you browsing history rubbish. And give all permissions from location to notifications etc to every website. 4. Click on some non-prominent personality's IG/fb name in some website. When it prompts you to install IG from app store proceed further. Do on boarding with defaults (i.e) allowing all permissions. 5. Instead of following popular people only in IG, search and add random people. 6. Everynow and then just make some photos of some tree or rubbish and upload. 7. Keep this phone as a junk phone.
- conradfr 4y ago
  > They do not want these passive users - no benefit They why do they basically force you yo create an account just to view the content?
  - throwaway2056 4y ago
    In exchange for your seeing some other's genuine photos/life/bowel habits (though it may be staged/scripted) - they would want you to totally give all your legitimate photos/life/bowel habits. I am sure PR from IG would not want to write this directly in main page.
labster 4y ago
Everyone gets upset when Amazon sells imitation products, but then when Instagram tries to do due diligence to make sure its products aren’t fake, they get upset about that too. They just can’t win, can they?
eatfish 4y ago
If you consider that Facebook bans around 5B accounts per year (https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissaholzberg/2021/03/22/facebook-banned-13-billion-accounts-over-three-months-to-combat-fake-and-harmful-content/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissaholzberg/2021/03/22/face...). At this point that's more noise than signal. Not ideal for you but I can see the problem. For whatever reason you met the bar for requiring more validation. If they had let you in then another N'000 fake accounts would have also passed the automated system. Someone else would be posting here, Reddit or Twitter explaining how Facebook had let in some bot and was posting fake and untruthful stories, on the internet no less.
kleene_op 4y ago
This happened to me years ago with Facebook. I had never used Facebook during my earlier school years and wanted to jump on the (late) train to help socialliaze with other students at my uni. I already hated Facebook at that time, but I seriously needed to make friends. I was planning never to upload anything of myself and only use it to check on social events and stuff like that. I was reluctant to give them the usual personal information during registration, but those were generic info I already gave to lots of other websites so I complied. After registration, I logged out and back in again, only to find out that there had been some kind of problem and that NOW I was required to upload a personal picture of myself so they can verify it really was me (despite me never having sent them any photo). I knew they were trying to manipulate me with gambler's fallacy. I went this far giving them some info, surely it wouldn't hurt giving them a single personal picture? This behavior felt so disgusting to me that I did not complete the account "recovery" process. The funny thing is that if they had been honnest right from the start and required I uploaded a picture during the registering process, I may actually have used FB. Reflecting back, I'm glad I did not use it. FB is a sinking ship that did more harm to society than good. And I did not need it to make friends at uni anyway.
sizzle 4y ago
Were you on VPN by chance, same thing happened to me and I’ve been permabanned ever since.
LeonTheremin 4y ago
Security theater. Instagram intrudes on your inner speech. "ADDICTED TO INSTAGRAM? says the ad. Below is a poll with two options: YES and HOW’D YOU KNOW. I tap my answer and the poll reveals its results. Forty-nine percent clicked HOW’D YOU KNOW." They know because they surveil your inner speech. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-36/essays/my-instagram/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-36/essays/my-instagram/
centixel 4y ago
Similar story for my wife with Facebook. After our marriage several years ago, she wanted to change her last name. Facebook requested we upload a marriage certificate. She refused and has never tried again. Facebook does not need to be anyone's proof of identity.
jwr 4y ago
I'm amazed you did the phone verification thing. That gives Facebook a way to tie your online behavior to a specific phone number, which changes very rarely (if ever). And if you or any of your friends uses WhatsApp, that gives Facebook information about your social network (by regularly uploading everyone's contact lists), and consequently inferred information about whether you have kids, which schools they go to, which doctors you call, and much much more. I specifically refuse to provide my phone number online because of privacy issues.
- herbst 4y ago
  I don't have a phone number these days. Only evil internet companies ask for one anyway. If I ever create an account for whatever reason I just rent a phone number ($0.20) once and hope I can secure the account with different means than only the number (Google Auth or so) I never use a phone number twice :)
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Facebook and other services owned by Meta can not use the phone numbers given to them for 2FA for any other purpose than 2FA else they will get in trouble with the FTC.
  - thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
    And yet they did
- jdthedisciple 4y ago
  Hehe, joke's on Meta: That is my secondary phone number for my second phone which I use 0 Meta products on.
captainmuon 4y ago
I think this is not about fighting spam, or abuse. The amount of social control that is created by tying online accounts to your person is staggering. Requiring a phone number, then a photo, or ID, is something that we only saw in China until recently. Now it got introduced through the backdoor in the West, too. The other day, somebody here in Germany got visited by the police and had their phone confiscated because they "liked" a (admittedly nasty) tweet on Twitter. I firmly believe this has a chilling effect on society and we need an unsupervised space for free speech.
- valis_iii 4y ago
richrichardsson 4y ago
I had this exact same "account being insta-banned" problem a while back and it turned out the issue was that I was using PiHole. After disabling it temporarily (and any browser AdBlockers for good measure) I was able to sign up for an account.

332 points by jdthedisciple 4y ago

reaperducer 4y ago

handwritten code on a clean piece of paper, followed by your full name and username - shows both of your hands holding the paper This is how Instagram finds out that I have only one finger on each hand. The middle ones.

lizardactivist 4y ago

I can't even complete registration of an account there. Despite never visiting or using the service, it says it has detected suspicious activity from my private, single-user residential IP number. But fewer Instagram accounts in this world is probably a good thing.

dk79XuL9 4y ago

They won't do anything after you've sent a selfie anyway. Same thing happened to me. They'll ignore all of your contact attempts. IG support is pretty much non-existent.

andrew_ 4y ago
They also won't act on trademark claims until a suit is filed. Been down that rabbit hole too.
- kube-system 4y ago
  D̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶l̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶a̶b̶i̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶t̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶D̶M̶C̶A̶?̶ edit: whoops, I misread the parent. I swear I know the difference between various IP types!
  - kelnos 4y ago
    The DMCA covers copyright violations, not trademark.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    I don't think DMCA touches trademark. And depending on what you mean by "lose liability protections" for ignoring valid takedowns, I'm pretty sure that applies to the specific item and they don't stop being a safe harbor in general.
BlueGh0st 4y ago
Same here. I was fairly active on my Instagram and used it directly from the app on my phone. One day, while using the search function, I suddenly got locked out. I sent in the selfie and haven't heard back in over 6 months.
MaximilianKohlr 4y ago
I read this article https://www.followchain.org/account-disabled-violating-terms-instagram/ https://www.followchain.org/account-disabled-violating-terms... saying you may need to do it multiple times. I finally relinquished and did it 3 times. No response at all. This is such BS.

foepys 4y ago

It seems that we are only one step away from "verified by Ancestry.com".

gus_massa 4y ago

My wife had to send a photo of herself, her ID, herself, her ID, herself, her ID, and after the third of fourth cycle, her account was marked as legit. I only can wish you good look against whatever "algorithm" they are using.

the_only_law 4y ago
One of those stupid dating apps has decided that I am not myself and I cannot upload pictures of myself because it's not me.
jazzyjackson 4y ago
so we're at the point where the steps to prove you're human are so arduous only a bot will have the patience to create a new account someone should try using "photograph of yourself, where you hold a piece of paper with the following, handwritten code on it: **" as a prompt on DALL-E/imagen
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Dall-E and its relatives are still pretty awful at text, at least for now. They have a decent idea of how individual letters are shaped, but trying to produce a specific word or phrase is generally pretty hopeless. Dall-E can sometimes correctly reproduce words that appear frequently in its training data, like "PIZZA", but its success rate on less common words is dismally low, especially when they're appearing out of context. Some pretty convincing examples of this behavior can be seen at: https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1531624303770279937 https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1531624303770279937
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Because they haven't been trained on that. Yet.
- grishka 4y ago
  Modern captchas have gotten really annoying, too. You used to be able to just effortlessly type characters from a distorted image in 5 seconds, but now proving that you're an actual real human is so much work I'm tempted to automate it.

openknot 4y ago

Not to defend the practice (because your case is a false positive for a new account), but rather to speculate on why your account was banned, it's likely due to an increase in impersonation on Instagram recently. In other words, some accounts steal the pictures of real people and then send follow requests to friends, and try to get them to tap on links that can give the bad actor access to the friends' accounts or buy cryptocurrencies. It's been spiking recently over the past couple of months (one case in a Canadian news article at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/instagram-photos-stolen-scam-1.6464240 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/instagram-photos-sto...), with other prominent cases documented in the past (2019: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/how-i-stopped-someone-impersonating-me-on-instagram.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/how-i-stopped-someone-impers... and 2021: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/instagram-accounts-created-with-stolen-pics-push-bogus-crypto-schemes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/instagram-accounts-created-w...). Bleeping Computer published a deeper article on the most recent ongoing spike (describing the crypto and Onlyfans scams): https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/instagrams-dark-side-sexual-harassers-crypto-scammers-id-thieves/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/instagrams-da... This doesn't justify at all the permanent deactivation of your completely new account, but just for curiosity's sake, I speculate that this is the reason your new account was banned (overly high security sensitivity on Instagram's end, due to a recent spike in false accounts that impersonate real people, to encourage others to buy cryptocurrency and/or click malicious links).

kube-system 4y ago
This particular scheme has been a ridiculous plague among my circle of friends on instagram recently. People create accounts mimicking an existing user, add an underscore at the end of the username, and then spam follow requests to all of their connections. Most people get a notification from someone they know, and they accept it without even thinking about. It is insanely effective. Reporting the accounts for impersonation seem to do nothing, instagram's responses to the support requests even say they don't have enough people to look at all of them, and so they didn't.
- openknot 4y ago

klyrs 4y ago

ADA lawsuit opportunity here for anybody without two hands...

hansword 4y ago

Simple rule: Don't use meta products. Shame everyone who attempts to copy their business practices.

xtracto 4y ago
Right... people should just stop using services that are aggressive. Remember you are the product, unless you pay them. So they dont care about you. Just dont use them. If o go to a restaurant and they let me waiting standing up more than 20 minutes, I'll just go somewhere else. Why do people treat internet websites any different? (You dont lose anything for not having Meta)
- ls15 4y ago
  > If o go to a restaurant and they let me waiting standing up more than 20 minutes, I'll just go somewhere else. Why do people treat internet websites any different? What if that restaurant is the one where all your friends and family are waiting for you? Somehow over the last couple of years, your friends and family just gave up on all the other restaurants and only gather in this restaurant, even though everyone agrees that the food isn't very good, but out of convenience everyone settled for this one (and for the promotions that they had in earlier days). Actually many of the other restaurants closed because of these network effects and the owner of the famous restaurant got rich and arrogant, but now that everyone goes to this restaurant, it is hard to convince people to try something else.
  - allarm 4y ago
    It is a weak argument imo. If you’re important to them they will follow. If not, there’s no point to keep in touch. I understand that there’s edge cases when it’s really difficult to switch or use an alternative platform (i.e. because of age), but overall it’s not that hard. At least it wasn’t in my case. And yeah, it is possible to eat in multiple restaurants at the same time, when it comes to social platforms.
    - ls15 4y ago

oblib 4y ago

I went to the Instagram sign-up page and filled out some info and submitted it and then decided not to submit whatever it was they were asking for next. Since then when I click on a link to an Instagram post shared on FB they blocked me and demand I set up an account. But if I use a different web browser I can view those posts. I rarely do that though. I just cannot give them the hit.

dylan604 4y ago

Sadly, for a side hustle, an Insta account is seemingly in my future. For someone like me that has never had an Insta account nor have I logged into my FB account for over 8 years, how does one create an account without this happening? Also, these kinds of stories fit well within the narrative of Meta === EvilCorp#1, but I always feel like there's a lot more going on than what is being told in these Ask HN/Tweets/etc. Like, how many accounts were attempted to be made in what time period coming from the same device/IP address/etc? Are the algos at Meta/FB/Insta so bad that legit users are honestly getting flagged like this?

openknot 4y ago
>"For someone like me that has never had an Insta account nor have I logged into my FB account for over 8 years, how does one create an account without this happening?" This is speculative, but probably try to recover your Facebook account first (because it's already verified), and then choose the option to try and create an Instagram account based on your logged-in Facebook account. I haven't tried this in practice as I haven't created a new account in a long time, so there's no guarantee this will work. If it doesn't, then unfortunately you would have to block off time to persistently follow the instructions as closely as you can (sending your photo and a note), likely over several days to create the account.

dmitrygr 4y ago

Look at it from their viewpoint. It is hard to do what they do. How else would they collect sellable info on you, without your assistance?

donmcronald 4y ago

> Even if this account does not contain and pictures of yourself or it represents somebody or something else, we can only help you when we receive a picture of you which fulfills these criteria. That's the part that makes me wonder what they're trying to accomplish. I had the same thing happen in 2019, so it's been going on for a long time. For me it happened with a handle that matches a decent .com domain I own when I was going around and registering accounts at every site I could think of (ie: brand protection). As far as I'm concerned they got nothing that helps them determine whether or not I'm going to use the account for legitimate purposes. I also did not violate their terms of service because it was a brand new registration. I didn't even get an email. I had to figure out where to send the request to have my account reactivated. I didn't like the idea of sending them a photo, but felt forced into it to make sure no one else could come along and squat on the handle that matches my brand. I don't have trademarks (yet) and, even if I did, claiming someone is violating a trademark is going to be a significant amount of effort vs sending them the photo they want. So, I capitulated even though I have no idea what they're using my photo for. My best guess is that Mark has it framed and hanging in his private art studio. I think there's a good chance that eventually big tech is going to run on massive facial recognition databases that were built against our will. I think Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft should be chopped into about 10 different companies each and the government shouldn't give any consideration to the impact it has on their business. They have no respect for us. We shouldn't have any respect for them IMO.

mistrial9 4y ago
> I think there's a good chance that eventually big tech is going to run on massive facial recognition databases that were built against our will. too late - this is an active industry with lots of funding. Further I believe that "metaverse" is an attempt to link that auto-ID to place, with tracking and profiles of all sorts of meat-scale interactions. The calls to boycott "metaverse" in the USA could not come soon enough.
dogleash 4y ago
>I think there's a good chance that eventually big tech is going to run on massive facial recognition databases that were built against our will. >eventually Already does. It's just not a bread and butter component of every company's business yet. We're already past the time where, in a few years, people will start pointing back and saying "well, if you don't like it, you should have done something then."

dweekly 4y ago

Sadly, email and phone verification have never been particularly effective methods of proving personhood/identity/non-malevolent intent. Witness the dozens of spam phone calls / pig butchering texts / Gmail-originating spam emails one gets a day. I noticed that after enabling iCloud Private Relay on my phone, I get a _lot_ more CAPTCHAs very suspicious of my activity. This is both annoying and logical; a site's confidence in my existence / non-malevolence is much decreased when I don't appear from a consistent IP and the IPs that I appear from have a non-zero quantity of bad actors from which I must now be disambiguated. This seems a classic example of a challenging problem of balancing privacy (wanting an option to be anonymous in my use of a service, including ones where I can post information or message others) with security (wanting to be sure that my counterparties are real humans unlikely to be malevolent or misrepresenting themselves). Service providers get slammed for errors on both sides. That's not to give up on trying to solve it or suggest that the current status quo is optimal. Going out on a limb here, I could imagine a solution where e.g. Private Relay users had egress from a special set of IPs that indicate to service providers that the originating user had indeed been identified/validated by Apple as authentic. Traffic inbound from these IPs could have a slightly relaxed threat posture. This is roughly in line with what Apple has been trying to do with Login With Apple; not just making it easier for users to sign in but helping reduce automated signups. An ideal component missing here would be a way to backchannel to Apple from a service provider "Hey, user $UID did a Bad Thing just FYI" to allow Apple to better risk-score Apple profiles/activity, obviously weighted by Apple for believability on the part of the service provider.

soco 4y ago
What you propose there could be built on the basis of identity federation, right?
- dweekly 4y ago
  In theory, yes, and ideally any of this would be implemented as a standard, for instance as a segment of a TLS ClientHello added by a forwarding proxy (such as Private Relay) that includes a UUID connection identifier, a risk category for the user, the identity of the proxy, and the proxy's signature for the whole of the ClientHello packet. There would then also be presumably a way to interrogate a proxy for reporting back bad actions of a user by a service provider, with those attestations also signed by the service provider. (FLAGGED_AS_BOT, CHILD_PORN_TAKEDOWN, FINANCIAL_FRAUD, SPAMMING, OTHER_TOS_VIOLATION, etc) The service provider would pass in the UUID connection identifier which the proxy could then map back to the known user, weighted by the degree to which the proxy trusts the service provider's reports.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gtourist 4y ago

I have a rule of only ever using Edge on Windows with no plugins (does Edge even have that?) when interacting with Google or Amazon account services, to avoid this "your account has been locked due to suspicious activity" nonsense, knowing that it only results in a hopeless black hole of canned email responses asking for information to unlock the account, only for it to remain locked after said information is provided. When using your accounts, never use Firefox, since it's down to like 2% marketshare, and automatically suspicious, and never use privacy-oriented plugins like uBlock, which suspiciously alter how and how much your browser communicates with these sites. Also never buy anything online late at night (like after 1 AM). Apparently that's suspicious, since a lot of fraudsters are international. It's incredible that these shitty ML hueristic systems are the best these "genius" FAANG developers, who get paid $150-300k a year, can come up with up. I love it when they or their loved ones get ensnared by these systems, like the Googler who threw a Twittertantrum when they locked his and his husband's Google Photos (or whatever they call it) account for "suspicious activity," and they lost thousands of photos. Pure lifefuel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357

donmcronald 4y ago
> It's incredible that these shitty ML hueristic systems are the best these "genius" FAANG developers, who get paid $150-300k a year, can come up with up. I think it gets personalized / fingerprinted fairly quickly TBH. For example, I have 2 identical (Linux + Firefox + uBlock Origin) VMs that I use over the same VPN connection. One of them gets almost no captcha challenges and the other gets them continuously. My subjective experience is that it's based on what you're searching for on Google or maybe due to hitting sites that Google might have flagged as malicious (guilt by association). It's tough to tell, but it sure feels like there's some type of cumulative score based on activity.

swasheck 4y ago

this happened to both me and my wife. never heard back. account remains unavailable. multiple follow ups went to black holes.

izzydata 4y ago
Do they even want users? What is their motive?

givemeethekeys 4y ago

You want a free account? Bend over. You want to host your own photos and share with your friends? Go ahead and figure it out on your own. Or build a better Instagram.

fsflover 4y ago
> Or build a better Instagram. https://fediverse.party/en/pixelfed/ https://fediverse.party/en/pixelfed/

annadane 4y ago

Zuckerberg is a problem. He exists only to buy out everyone else and will not stop until everybody is destroyed

izzydata 4y ago

I highly dislike this forced real identity thing on the internet. What is the problem with using internet aliases to post internet stuff in a manner entirely unrelated to your personal life?

ghaff 4y ago
Because, while extremely imperfect, making a modicum of effort to make sure someone is a real person still screens out a lot of bots and anonymous scammers--which is at least a start.
- adastra22 4y ago
  While completely destroying a core benefit of the internet.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Anonymity was not really considered a core benefit of the early Internet. In fact, early Internet users typically had true names associated with universities, companies, and the government.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      If you define "Internet" to be email and such, yes. But as soon as the World Wide Web went mainstream in the mid 90's, being pseudonymous while online was very much a core principle of the internet. "No one knows you're a dog on the internet" was a common saying.
      - JCharante 4y ago
        nothing stopping you from chilling in IRC or mastadon it's just the normie networks that want real names
- stazz1 4y ago
  Disagree, i think it's so you can find your friends.

Animats 4y ago

Papers, please. Glory to Arstotzka! Cause no trouble.

drexlspivey 4y ago
For the curious https://youtu.be/8XcyZ-ls9_Y https://youtu.be/8XcyZ-ls9_Y
contingencies 4y ago
Yesterday I had a consultant locked down in one of these Chinese zero-economy policy snap lockdowns. Hordes of special police came to enforce the lockdown which is ongoing. His hotel was right at the edge. After some suitable wangling he was able to obtain a special paper from a petty official to leave the quarantine zone. Returning in the evening, split lovers could be seen smooching over the quarantine fence. Nobody gave a damn. We expect it to last three days then return to normal.

dorkwood 4y ago

Be thankful that they've given you a way to restore your account. They didn't to me. I suspect I was supposed to be thrown into the same verification pipeline as you, but something got messed up along the way and now I have a completely unresponsive app (black screen with a refresh button that does nothing) with no instructions on how to fix it. I thought maybe it was some weird Android bug, so I bought an iPhone and logged in on that only to find that it is also unresponsive. I just want to delete the account at this point, but I can't, since trying to access the deletion link returns an error telling me to open the (unresponsive) app to regain access to my account. I've contacted a lawyer who works in the field, since I'm pretty sure preventing me from deleting my account is a violation of their TOS. Who knows if that will go anywhere. I'm kind of at my wit's end here. If anyone has any better ideas, I'm all ears.

sofixa 4y ago
> I've contacted a lawyer who works in the field, since I'm pretty sure preventing me from deleting my account is a violation of their TOS If you're in the EU, it's also a violation of "the right to be forgotten" and you can contact your ICO.

LegitShady 4y ago

I made a twitter account, followed a few accounts, and then it was locked and twitter demanded I send them a scan of my government issued ID to prove I was a real person. I decided twitter wasn't worth that kind of identity theft risk. Same thing this happening with instagram - I'm not sure why anyone would want to volunteer this information to these companies whose whole finance model is abusing your personal information. I personally don't think any of these social media companies are worth sending pictures or ID to.

fritigern 4y ago

We should stop using Instagram or any Facebook service.

jsnell 4y ago

> How can I allegedly have broken Instagram terms when I just created the account and even verified it by phone? Your account appears, for whatever reason, bulk-created. For example maybe you were creating it from a network that somebody had used for a lot of IG account creation, or you created it with Firefox on Linux and 99% of their Firefox+Linux registrations are from spammers since it's easy to automate and run on a cloud server, etc. It's actually pretty friendly from them to notify you immediately, rather than wait until you have gotten attached to the account. > Are there really no less intrusive ways than the above to prove ones ownership of account?? Your ownership of the account is obviously not really under question. It's a freshly created account, it can't possibly have been hijacked yet. But is it your first account or the thousandth? Email addresses can be minted for free. Phone numbers for pennies. Since phone-verified, US-IP Instagram accounts seem to be selling for about $7 in bulk, those pennies are not much of an obstacle. But it's pretty hard for you to get selfies from a lot of people in an automated way. (Sure, you could go to a parking lot and pay people to do the selfie for you. But that's a much higher bar.) And then if suspicion remains, it allows IG to ask for either a second selfie or a picture of a government ID, and verify that your identity has actually stayed stable.

sbf501 4y ago
> from a network that somebody had used for a lot side note: I still can't edit wikipedia because my block of IP addresses has been banned for some reason. I just moved to a new house and can only edit if I go to a coffee shop!
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  Normally you can make an account while on a non-blocked IP, then use that account on the blocked-IP.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Same here. Not my IP but a whole IP ranges probably spanning almost the whole country.
grishka 4y ago

ergonaught 4y ago

I had a similar experience creating a FB account. Before I could even fully log in, it was suspended for violating whatever.

fleddr 4y ago

Your experience sucks but it's too simplistic to consider this malice/evil. I think none of us fully understand the extreme levels of abuse a service like Insta (and several other services) have to deal with. It's abuse at scale and ever-changing, hence an endless cat and mouse game where non-transparent heuristics create false positives. By the way, your method of verification (holding up a sign) is also common at porn sites. That's what my friend told me anyway.

kka_dev 4y ago

Bit similar happened to me. I had account for about 3 years, posted like once a month, followed friends and some celebs - nothing out of ordinary. Then some day I was greeted via form that I needed to give my birthday as I apparently had not done that yet. I just threw in random date as I thought it is none of their business. Well turns out now that due to me "being under 13" my account is marked for deletion and I have 30 days to appeal with similar requirement. I tried to write them but got automated response. Ended up losing my IG account and learned valuable lesson that if I am not in control of my data I am not calling the shots either.

kazinator 4y ago

> "photograph of yourself, where you hold a piece of paper with the following, handwritten code on it" Wow, these people sure know how to write nice prompts for AI-driven image generation!

thaumasiotes 4y ago
Current AI image generators cannot repeat text you provide to them. But this request seems like it's pretty vulnerable to a template photo of a person holding a piece of paper, where you'd edit the photo to overlay a photo of paper on which you've written the code.

3327 4y ago

acaloiar 4y ago

In a somewhat related response to your question: "Is this the type of "progress" happening at FAANG?" I recently had a similar experience with Robinhood. I found that if you use their "Logout all devices" feature, you have to re-verify your account with them. They allow you to deposit and place trades, but as soon as you attempt a withdrawal, they notify you that you have to re-verify your identity with them. After two weeks and three denied attempts to verify my identity, I got the SEC involved. Within minutes of the SEC notifying me that they contacted Robinhood on my behalf, my account was verified without further action from me. I withdrew all funds, closed all positions, and deactivated the account out of principle. It shouldn't take SEC action to get access to your funds. And Robinhood shouldn't notify their users that identity verification is required only when a withdrawal is attempted. Robinhood obviously isn't FAANG, but apparently this is the progress in tech more generally.

tiffanyh 4y ago
Robinhood is required by regulation to KYC their new account holders. Which typically is accomplished via doc auth. This is applicable to all financial service companies, in the US at least.
- acaloiar 4y ago
  I'm familiar with KYC. KYC is actually the very reason why Robinhood customers should not be required to re-verify their identity because it stipulates that institutions both acquire and retain the identity information of their customers. With that said, my qualms are not with the fact that I had to re-verify; simply the manner in which it happened. The fact that they re-requested my identity tells you that this verification process was not in support of their KYC obligation, but likely a fraud-prevention mechanism. Which puts the manner in which it happened entirely within their control from a product perspective.
- malux85 4y ago
  So KYC them when you onboard them, NOT when they try to withdraw. “Oh no, that might hurt our signup and trading figures?! “ Well, DUH, but anything to fudge the numbers right?! Maybe if they make withdrawals even more difficult a percentage of users will abandon and then our assets under management numbers look better. This is exactly what’s happening, stop forgiving the dark pattern behaviour under the guise of compliance.

djsamseng 4y ago

A possible solution? Would love to hear any feedback - please shoot this down with any flaws you find! What if we had a centralized certificate authority that verified a person? Imagine you walk up to the DMV and get a private key (password). When you go to a website you generate a public key and send it to the website you visit. That website uses the public key it received to send a message to the certificate authority to verify you (true/false). Now Instagram knows you are real, but are you faking? I claim to be "First Last" to Instagram. Instagram encrypts "First Last" using the public key and sends it to the certificate authority. If the certificate authority is able to decode "First Last" using the private key then it returns (true/false). Could we extend this to solve user privacy? What if users said "Track me all you want as long as you don't know who I am". Websites can still serve targeted ads but users get the privacy that you are incognito. Instagram now knows your name but they also want to be able to identify you across the internet. So Instagram could also ask the certificate authority for a "personId" that identifies the person across the internet. But now you say, wait now Instagram knows my name and all my activity through my "personId". This is where the Engineers come in. We would have to make any code or action that connects "personId" to a human _illegal_. You write the code, you go to jail. This burden would only fall on websites that ask for someone's human identifiers (name, address, common geolocations, etc.). But that code isn't needed anyway! There is no reason to store "personId" and "First Last" together because you can always get a "personId" when the user gives the public key to the website. So if someone ever writes that code / uses that data query it's punishable by law. So now we have 1. Every website knows it's users are real 2. Every website can know a user is who they say they are 3. Every website can track unique visitors and their internet activity (while not knowing who they actually are) 4. Every user is completely "anonymous". Yes the information could get out, but only temporarily because any code (even a news article or blog) that contains this connection is illegal.

gjs278 4y ago
smsm42 4y ago
> Imagine you walk up to the DMV and get a private key (password). So, the government has control over your identity. If it wants to shut you down, it would just refuse to verify your certificate. And you'd instantly lose access to every website, bank account, phone number, etc. you had. The government would also automatically know every time you create any account anywhere - as they get a ping on their auth services. Does you trust in the government extend this far? Fo you have any politician you do not trust? Imagine he or she becomes in control of the system. Are you still OK with the government controlling the keys to your life? Ok, let's assume it does. What happens when (note, I do not say if) somebody unauthorized gets access to the keys stored at the DMV? They'd be able to fake any identity the want to. And the only way to fix it is to force everybody (hundreds of millions of people) to re-certify. Imagine how well will that go. > Track me all you want as long as you don't know who I am There's massive body of research that indicates unless you take special measures, like injecting noise into the system, tracking can lead to identification in a very short time. Just think about it - tracking will immediately tell where you live, where you work, where you shop, which businesses you patronize, which music do you listen to, etc. etc. - how many people have exactly the same profile as you do? Likely not many. Now if at any point connected to your profile any piece of your identity leaks out - your anonymity is gone forever.

hk1337 4y ago

It’s silly since it’s a brand new account, what do they have to compare it to to confirm it’s you?

aeyes 4y ago

This happened to me multiple times on Facebook when trying to open new accounts to view some walled garden content, each time I used a different mail address on a domain I control in an incognito browser session. The accounts would just get blocked after a day. On the last attempt I thought that I should feed the ML model with more data so I liked some pages and posted some random stuff to the profile. The account still works without any further activity besides using it to view content once very couple of moons. I came to the conclusion that creating an account and not immediately using it is a ban. Just another reason to not use these platforms, they don't even want our business.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
I went a different way. I bought 10 facebook accounts from a web site that specializes in that stuff. Each worked for some time, but eventually after a year all got banned. I didn't post anything, just visited neighborhood forums.

atum47 4y ago

Is like they trying to get people to delete their account at this point. My feed only shows pictures of people that I don't know https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31755825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31755825

cma 4y ago

By normalizing this, scammers may start impersonating Meta and easily convincing people to send them a photo holding their license etc. and maybe even trick them into holding up a social security card.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

CosmicShadow 4y ago

I opened a business account and had this happen instantly. It asked for my age, which as a company was 1, so I put that and it instabanned me for being underage. It also didn't help that the website signup didn't work well and lastpass kept trying to autolog me in every step of the way making me look like a spam bot. I had to send the same pic of me holding license thing, it was intrusive. It took a few weeks to get through and eventually the replies just started coming back in Bangladeshi, and I could tell from the signatures where the support was taking place (as if the translate wasn't enough). I have an account now, but what a bullshit experience. Why not be more clear on requirements (i.e. age) and not even allow someone to put 1?

KajMagnus 4y ago

What's happening to Meta/Facebook and Instagram? Are they destroying themselves from inside, when they cannot get their stuff together enough to fix their bugs preventing new people from joining? My years old Instagram blocked, although I had never posted anything, just looked at other people's posts some years ago. There was an error message about me having violated their terms of service. Although it worked the last time I used it, and thereafter I did nothing for many years. So I tried to create a new account. First I got "Internal Error, try again". And then, (I tried again), after having chosen a password and verified my email (a new address for a new account), there was an error like "Seems you're using an open proxy. If you think this is not the case ... blah blah".

jotm 4y ago
They're doing you a favor, just quit that garbage.

uoaei 4y ago

My account was discontinued because I refused to add a phone number, use an adblocker, and access from browser only. Apparently this makes my account look "suspicious".

rdxm 4y ago

dclaw 4y ago

Fuck Facebook. Do not ever use anything they touch. Burn it to the ground.

pingec 4y ago

Similar story here. Some years old IG account, logging in maybe once per month. One day few months ago instagram decided to deactivate my account and wanted my selfie to get it back. I never really used the platform so I'll just stay without.

paranoidrobot 4y ago

This is exactly what happened to me, several years ago. I told them to f-off, I still don't have an Instagram account.

chucky123 4y ago

This is something that happens with google, twitter, meta properties and mostly all major faang companies. They track heaps of information when you signup. They will track your ip, device fingerprint, location and everything else. And they will try to figure out if it matches malicious activities like bot usage, scraping behaviour, etc and if yes, they will block your account. In most cases, they don't even block your account but will play dumb. You will get page loading errors, insta app will say that your content couldn't be loaded, twitter will say that this browser isn't supported, etc.

wallfacer120 4y ago

Remember, you deserve 100% convenience and 100% privacy and 100% security. If you fail to get it, it's because corporations are evil and society has failed you.

LeonB 4y ago

An Instagram customer being asked to take a selfie seems like a very effective and non-intrusive method in this specific context.

radamba 4y ago

Airbnb, in Canada, requires your driver's license number or passport number to set up an account, despite their ToS saying they just need your name and address... So not just FAANG...

aasasd 4y ago

Since they're asking for a picture anyway, send them the middle finger holding the goatse photo. Just to make sure you won't use the service by accident in the future. BTW, funny how half of HN hate FB, Google and Amazon, and the other half literally dream of working there.

z9znz 4y ago

> After registering, I was immediately told my account was disabled for suspicious activity > Your account has been disabled for violating our terms I have experienced that same process on Facebook, with the same wording. However, I was never able to get anything after that. In my case, I had deleted my facebook account a few years prior, and finally I was reluctantly making it again since I really needed access to a particular travel/region group. What really blew my mind is that I had only gotten to do the very first step of account creation. I had not reached the point where I could have done or written (or posted or uploaded) anything objectionable. In essence, I "violated" their terms merely by signing up. Basically, their sh*t is broken and deeply flawed, likely unintentionally but possibly _also_ intentionally.

anonymousiam 4y ago

This is a common tactic by Facebook. They tried it on me a little over five years ago and I did not comply. After resetting my password via the verified email account, I got this: "Hi, Your Facebook account is temporarily locked as a security precaution. Here's how you can get back in: 1. Try logging into your account and completing the recovery steps from a computer or mobile phone you’ve previously used to log into Facebook. You can start the recovery process here: https://www.facebook.com/recover/initiate https://www.facebook.com/recover/initiate 2. If you're still having trouble regaining access to your account, please reply to this email and attach a certificate of incorporation or other proof of the legitimacy of your business, such as a: - Utility bill - Local business license (issued by your city, county, state, etc.) - Tax filing - Certificate of Formation (for a partnership) - Articles of Incorporation (for a corporation) Note: Your name must be on the document you submit. If you haven't already, please also attach a copy of your personal ID. You can review what types of ID we accept and how to send your attachments over a secure connection here: https://www.facebook.com/help/183256078471165/?ref=cr Please note that we can't process your request until you provide ID that meets these requirements. In the meantime, your account will remain hidden on the site as a safeguard. Thanks, The Facebook Team" Thereafter I was getting weekly email reminders: "It looks like the information on xxx is inaccurate or out of date. Please verify the the information below for accuracy. If we don't hear from you by (two weeks), the information in question will be automatically updated." That went on for over two years, and then the message changed to "Weekly Facebook Page update for xxx" So it seems that Facebook will lock you out of your account if you delete their cookies from your browser and reset your password via email. They've decided that the email address they've already verified is insufficient proof of your identity, so they want you to send them a gold mine of PII to get back on. No thanks.

processing 4y ago

Not surprised. Meta/Facebook are making it really hard to use their platform nowadays. Why is this? I run or should I say I ran several Facebook pages with large audiences. I've verified my identity numerous times yet again and again I get a notice saying I can't post as I'm not authorized to post to large audiences (all pages I built from scratch). I DM support and they tell me to "check my browser" then spend 30 mins chatting to get to the problem and they can't offer any help. The funny thing is I can still post Ads for these pages but not post anything "organic". The platform has become annoying and very tiring to use.

HiroshiSan 4y ago

Thanks for the write up here’s my experience posted 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962588 The worst part about it is not the deactivation itself but the fact that you can’t get support until you give them what they want otherwise they refuse to help. How that’s an okay business practice is beyond me.

max51 4y ago

I have had the same problem as you. All I want is the possibility to view other people's posts and zoom on the pictures. The part I never saw discussed anywhere is how the f()ck was Instagram planning to "verify " my identity with a picture when I never uploaded anything?! What are they gonna compare the picture to? I personally gave up on it and just bought an account online. I don't know how they did it but the companies selling accounts to failed influencers apparently figured out how to make them look legit. No clue how they do it because even linking my real cell number got me blocked in less than a week (I have had this number since before fakebook was founded btw) Also, what the point of being so aggressive about verifying the accounts of people who don't post/comment/like anything and only view a handful of posts per day? I would understand it if viewing posts was possible without an account, but that's no longer the case. They force you to make an account just to view public posts.

sha-3 4y ago
> All I want is the possibility to view other people's posts and zoom on the pictures. Check out Bibliogram[0], an alternate front-end for Instagram. Most of their instances[1] are partially blocked, but you can still view the recent posts and zoom in on them. [0]: https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram-docs/tree/master/docs/Instances.md https://git.sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram-docs/tree/master/docs/...

safety1st 4y ago

I was also permanently banned from Instagram a few months ago. I received the same email and sent them my photo. Never heard back. No idea what the reason for the ban was. I had never posted anything, had followed a few dozen people and would check out their posts occasionally. Who knows? The IG account was linked to my FB account which I've been a more active user of for over a decade. This pretty much ended my desire to interact with FB since who knows if a mystery ban is on the way for that account too. Zuck had a good run /shrug

SoftTalker 4y ago

This is the sort of situation where I would be tempted to send a photo of my genitalia, with the written code.

throwaway2056 4y ago

SOLUTION: After quite some frustration I found a solution for IG/FB. I believe they know from onboarding processes what type of user is passive and the ones that will be CRAZY active. They do not want these passive users - no benefit. Try this: 1. A old android/iPhone 2. Dump about 50 contacts (you may google for VCF) 3. Open all sorts of yellow press - from dailymail to tmz etc. Make you browsing history rubbish. And give all permissions from location to notifications etc to every website. 4. Click on some non-prominent personality's IG/fb name in some website. When it prompts you to install IG from app store proceed further. Do on boarding with defaults (i.e) allowing all permissions. 5. Instead of following popular people only in IG, search and add random people. 6. Everynow and then just make some photos of some tree or rubbish and upload. 7. Keep this phone as a junk phone.

conradfr 4y ago
> They do not want these passive users - no benefit They why do they basically force you yo create an account just to view the content?
- throwaway2056 4y ago
  In exchange for your seeing some other's genuine photos/life/bowel habits (though it may be staged/scripted) - they would want you to totally give all your legitimate photos/life/bowel habits. I am sure PR from IG would not want to write this directly in main page.

labster 4y ago

Everyone gets upset when Amazon sells imitation products, but then when Instagram tries to do due diligence to make sure its products aren’t fake, they get upset about that too. They just can’t win, can they?

eatfish 4y ago

If you consider that Facebook bans around 5B accounts per year (https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissaholzberg/2021/03/22/facebook-banned-13-billion-accounts-over-three-months-to-combat-fake-and-harmful-content/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissaholzberg/2021/03/22/face...). At this point that's more noise than signal. Not ideal for you but I can see the problem. For whatever reason you met the bar for requiring more validation. If they had let you in then another N'000 fake accounts would have also passed the automated system. Someone else would be posting here, Reddit or Twitter explaining how Facebook had let in some bot and was posting fake and untruthful stories, on the internet no less.

kleene_op 4y ago

This happened to me years ago with Facebook. I had never used Facebook during my earlier school years and wanted to jump on the (late) train to help socialliaze with other students at my uni. I already hated Facebook at that time, but I seriously needed to make friends. I was planning never to upload anything of myself and only use it to check on social events and stuff like that. I was reluctant to give them the usual personal information during registration, but those were generic info I already gave to lots of other websites so I complied. After registration, I logged out and back in again, only to find out that there had been some kind of problem and that NOW I was required to upload a personal picture of myself so they can verify it really was me (despite me never having sent them any photo). I knew they were trying to manipulate me with gambler's fallacy. I went this far giving them some info, surely it wouldn't hurt giving them a single personal picture? This behavior felt so disgusting to me that I did not complete the account "recovery" process. The funny thing is that if they had been honnest right from the start and required I uploaded a picture during the registering process, I may actually have used FB. Reflecting back, I'm glad I did not use it. FB is a sinking ship that did more harm to society than good. And I did not need it to make friends at uni anyway.

sizzle 4y ago

Were you on VPN by chance, same thing happened to me and I’ve been permabanned ever since.

LeonTheremin 4y ago

Security theater. Instagram intrudes on your inner speech. "ADDICTED TO INSTAGRAM? says the ad. Below is a poll with two options: YES and HOW’D YOU KNOW. I tap my answer and the poll reveals its results. Forty-nine percent clicked HOW’D YOU KNOW." They know because they surveil your inner speech. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-36/essays/my-instagram/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-36/essays/my-instagram/

centixel 4y ago

Similar story for my wife with Facebook. After our marriage several years ago, she wanted to change her last name. Facebook requested we upload a marriage certificate. She refused and has never tried again. Facebook does not need to be anyone's proof of identity.

jwr 4y ago

I'm amazed you did the phone verification thing. That gives Facebook a way to tie your online behavior to a specific phone number, which changes very rarely (if ever). And if you or any of your friends uses WhatsApp, that gives Facebook information about your social network (by regularly uploading everyone's contact lists), and consequently inferred information about whether you have kids, which schools they go to, which doctors you call, and much much more. I specifically refuse to provide my phone number online because of privacy issues.

herbst 4y ago
I don't have a phone number these days. Only evil internet companies ask for one anyway. If I ever create an account for whatever reason I just rent a phone number ($0.20) once and hope I can secure the account with different means than only the number (Google Auth or so) I never use a phone number twice :)
charcircuit 4y ago
Facebook and other services owned by Meta can not use the phone numbers given to them for 2FA for any other purpose than 2FA else they will get in trouble with the FTC.
- thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
  And yet they did
jdthedisciple 4y ago
Hehe, joke's on Meta: That is my secondary phone number for my second phone which I use 0 Meta products on.

captainmuon 4y ago

I think this is not about fighting spam, or abuse. The amount of social control that is created by tying online accounts to your person is staggering. Requiring a phone number, then a photo, or ID, is something that we only saw in China until recently. Now it got introduced through the backdoor in the West, too. The other day, somebody here in Germany got visited by the police and had their phone confiscated because they "liked" a (admittedly nasty) tweet on Twitter. I firmly believe this has a chilling effect on society and we need an unsupervised space for free speech.

valis_iii 4y ago

richrichardsson 4y ago

I had this exact same "account being insta-banned" problem a while back and it turned out the issue was that I was using PiHole. After disabling it temporarily (and any browser AdBlockers for good measure) I was able to sign up for an account.