I don’t think that is necessarily true, Willie. I tend to agree with Loli. The behaviour is exactly like a huge phishing operation, a data mining op. It appears to be arbitrary, as well. Out of the blue,, they deactivate tens of thousands accounts per day and accuse the users of providing false information when they originally opened their accounts. (The net is full of threads of people complaining about this, especially in the past five years.)
Many of these people were naive and trusted FB, and over the years used it as photo storage of irreplaceable images of their families and all the baby pictures of their young ones—often the only images they have of their children as they grew up. Some have their whole lives stored on FB. And one day, ::POOF:: it’s all gone. Held hostage by FB.
They are told that, in order to reactivate their accounts, they must provide images—jpgs preferably—of official documents, photo IDs, drivers licences, professional licenses, passports, etc., any one of which will do.
Ever since the internet became available to the general public, we’ve been told to never submit to any request like this. We’ve all been told that no legitimate organization asks for this type of info in this way. But now FB does it routinely and holds extremely valuable sentimental property hostage until one submits. And they submit by the thousands every day.
Why is it necessary for FB to behave this way? When google, chrome, yahoo, etc., questions one’s identity concerning email accounts, they merely ask you the safety questions you provided upon opening the account and then they send a code to your phone. Why should FB be any different? Aren’t email accounts primary documents for opening an FB account?
Do you not think that a terrorist can’t photoshop a false official ID? It’s not as if FB will scan the passport or drivers license for their authenticating security features. They just want an image of it—an easily forged image. This is cake for a terrorist to provide. I could easily make one up with the free editing software I have on my hard drive. I no longer have to worry about replicating the holograms or other security features. It’s cake for anyone who knows how to edit images.
It is quite something else, however, to an average honest mensch who justs want to share the progress their family life with other friends and family—it is everything to them. And FB knows it.
So, if having people put their official documents on the internet accomplishes nothing toward the stated goal of preventing fraud and terrorism, why would an org that admittedly gets hacked for millions of their user’s information every two months or so, ask for this information?
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