Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Facebook

"Your account has been temporarily suspended

Suspicious activity has been detected on your Facebook account and it has been temporarily suspended as a security precaution. It is likely that your account was compromised as a result of entering your password on a website designed to look like Facebook. This type of attack is known as phishing."

I've lost track of how long it has been since I've been able to access my Facebook account. 3 weeks? 4? Facebook wants me to "confirm" my identity with some ridiculous "face recognition" type of test: I have to correctly identify a certain number of the faces in photographs of people on my "friends" list. The problem with that is I have 100 people on my "friends" list and I don't even know most of them by sight. The vast majority of them are people I have connected with on the Internet and have never met personally.

So Facebook expects me to be able to identify these people. What are they thinking? I guess I'm lucky I only have 100 "friends" on Facebook - imagine being one of those people with several hundred or even thousands of "friends". Again: what are the people at Facebook thinking?

And of course they are not about to give me an easy or obvious way to contact them about my account. Who knows if I'll ever find out what happened? Was it actually phishing or was it something else?

Yeah, I know: what do I expect for free?

This is why I stopped using MySpace years ago. Too many bugs kept it from coming anywhere near fulfilling the potential usefulness I thought it might be able to have for me. Is Facebook going the same way? Is it time to start looking for the next social network?

Seems that way to me.