Gian Piero de Bellis

During the month of March, I received a message from Facebook saying that my page had been suspended. As I had other friends that were experiencing the same problem, I thought it was a blip in the system (I hadn't written anything shocking recently) and that is would resolve itself within a few days.

However, the days went by and nothing happened. What's more, I discovered through a message that my page had been suspended because of my age. This is the info that I received at a certain point in time.

“If we still find that you're not old enough to be on Facebook, your account will remain disabled. This is because your account doesn't follow our Terms of Service.
We're always looking out for the security of people on Facebook, so until then you can't use your account.”.
They were attributing to me the age of a 13-year-old boy

I was not terribly worried about the fact of being excluded by Facebook, but things started taking a new turn when I received a message that my Facebook password had been changed from some location in Europe. In the same message the Facebook people were advising me to change my password if this wasn't me who had done so.
I duly complied.
To my dismay almost every single day I received a message that my password had been changed from some strange location of this world and that I had to intervene to ensure the security of my account.
The situation was becoming farcical because the sooner I intervened to modify my password and make it more complex, the sooner somebody intervened to change it again.  My password has been modified more that 50 times from so many locations.

From farcical the situation became a bit serious when I was informed that £17 would be taken from my account to pay for a publicity I had chosen to do.
So, my page had been suspended, my data had been stolen, and, according to Facebook, I had the time and the wish to book some publicity space. I thought this totally ludicrous. At the same time, I verified my bank account, and nothing had been taken out of it. Being a curious person and a social researcher, I wanted to verify if that sum would be taken from my account at a certain point in time.
In my mind this would confirm that the security problem was engineered by people inside Facebook that would channel towards themselves some payment for publicity extorted by millions of customers.

When the money was actually taken from my account and more publicity payments were on their way, I decided it was time to intervene, and I blocked my Visa card. In the end this experience in social scam has costed me £99, nothing extraordinary. However, it was very worth the loss because this experience has given me plenty of food for thought.

1. First of all I have understood that Facebook is characterized by total insecurity and absolute scam.
They are not at all interested in safeguarding your data. They are there just for the buck. So, you confide your data to Facebook at your risk and peril. Given this situation the best thing to do is to cancel your account and to remove as soon as possible all data concerning you from all their servers.

2. The total lack of security is compounded and confirmed by the fact that, once you have lost the control of your page, there is no way whatsoever for you to intervene or to communicate to some Facebook agent that will listen to you and put things right. This is one of the reasons why, as a social scientist, I think that the scam is an internally engineered operation.

3. While these things were happening to me, I got the information that 533 million Facebook accounts in 106 countries have been hacked. So, mine is not an isolated case, as I am in the company of half a billion people all over the world. A discomforting confirmation that Facebook is total scam.

Now, time to draw some conclusions.
I will ask Facebook via Slow Mail (the only possible contact) to erase my name forever from their servers.
I will cancel Facebook from all my computers.
I will inform people how toxic Facebook can become. There is no place for such a social cesspool in the lives of honest people in the future.

On the Net there are now many articles presenting evidence about how unsavory Facebook has become (to say the least)
For a critical analysis of Facebook, I invite you to refer to this article:

Facebook Gets Rich Off Of Ads That Rip Off Its Users

In that article you find this statement that sums up quite well the nature of Facebook: “Facebook created a financial symbiosis with scammers, hackers, and disinformation peddlers who use its platforms to rip off and manipulate people around the world. The result is a global economy of dishonesty in which Facebook has at times prioritized revenue over the enforcement of policies seemingly put in place to protect the people who use its platform.”

Don't be part of that vicious system.

Facecrook