What scares me most about all these stories and personal experience, is it often seems the only way to get these actual issues resolved is to know someone that works at the company, or have enough of a platform on the internet that eventually the cost of the bad PR gets to be enough that someone notices and fixes it.

I don't know anyone that works at Facebook/Google/Uber/etc. When I have issues they just go unresolved. Uber Eats double-submitted my order after throwing up a bundle of internal server errors and literally my only recourse at this point is apparently to sue them to get my $26 back. (Which I'm seriously considering -- even if I don't get my $26 back, it will certainly cost them more than $26 just to respond so at least the cosmic accounting will balance out.)

It would be really nice if there were companies to give my money to that did have some semblance of customer support that didn't require making friends with the right people or curating a social media following.

A few months ago, someone tried to create a fake account to impersonate my mom. And long story short, somehow we couldn't get 2FA sms token to login again(which I suspect is a bug), then the account was disabled not given a reason.

We tried the process to verify it was her account, but after being asked to submit passport photo + her photo, the ticket stops progressing for the past 2 months and it has been very frustrating for us. The account has years of my mom's photo that wasn't backed up elsewhere. If there happens to be any engineer passing by that can escalate this internally, I would be much appreciated.

Facebook's "user support" is getting to the point where Google's support is looking like a sane one. At least the automated system works when it is supposed to. I got a couple of really weird behaviors trying to unlock the account: the system asked to select an item from an empty list to send 2FA code. The initial sms 2FA code that we received when the attacker tried to login somehow got wrong encoding data (utf8 vs utf16), which shows up as non sensical Chinese character.

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

From TFA:

>Fortunately I have some friends and ex-colleagues who work at Facebook so I reached out to them and asked for help, some of whom were kind enough to submit internal support tickets on my behalf. I wasn’t sure that was going to help so I fired off more emails and uploads of my ID but heard nothing. Thankfully 3 days later, I got a very terse email — “We unlocked your account”

This is a common refrain that I see in all these FB/Google "locked out or banned" horror stories. Unless you have some friends at high places at FB/Google, you're SOL if you ever get locked out of your FB or Gmail account.

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

Why the fuck does FB care if a user is incarcerated?

What’s next? You’re behind on your car payments or child support?

Your credit score is too low...

I didn't realize Facebook had this policy and I'm curious if other services do.

I would have assumed that an incarcerated person could give their credentials to a trusted person outside to manage their account for them and relay information.

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

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

Please say more.

Pretty sure the same guy that tries to purchase and guess your password locked your account.

It seems to be relatively easy to lock someone’s account since they don’t check. Related: https://bitrebels.com/social/how-to-someones-facebook-shut-d...

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

They were doing you a favour. Stop using Facebook.

The author raises the point that his account could have been marked due to fake information submitted via their law enforcement request form.

It occurs to me that companies don't run bug bounties and authorised pentesting programs for process flaws - I assume that would be deemed out-of-scope "social engineering" even if it doesn't involve any psychological trickery and just involves uploading a forged official document and seeing if they even try to validate it at all.

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

Allowing insiders to shepherd tickets is a ticking legal time bomb for these companies.

Given how bad their dispute resolution is, and the huge dollar value of getting your account back in an emergency, insider support channels are highly valuable.

If I were in an AG's office I'd find a case of quid pro quo and research a bribery suit. These companies operate internationally, so there are FCPA implications as well

(and I'm not a lawyer)

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

The most important take away for me is:

Don't use services like Facebook.

Of course now a lot of people will moan when they read this because they think my alternative is living in a hut in the forest but what I want to say is that these companies have that kind of power because we gave it to them by exclusively using their services because it was so convenient when they lured us in.

Using other services or even building them on your own is more effort but it could be worth the extra time when I look at scenes like this one.

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

Ehm ehm and why ?

Curious, is there even a paid alternative to FB?

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

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