Wednesday, November 21, 2012

FaceBook, or the Digital Kindergarten

Showing off, being engaging, throwing parties, bullying others - these are not new and not specific to social networking sites like Facebook.

Simply by virtue of being the biggest and most hyped up site, the good people of Facebook Inc. get a lot of unjustified flak.

I would like to talk about how to get off Facebook.

Log in, delete the account.

What if you created an account years ago and never used it once? Worse, what if you have forgotten everything but the name and then have to wade through their "help" pages to figure out what to do.

Worse still, they just sent you an email asking if you logged in from a new location?

Which you did not, so your zombie account was definitely hijacked!

What was your birthday again (the one you used for web sites that have no business asking your for your date of birth), and what was the name of your first school? Why would you ever enter your real birth date on any web site other than your school's or a government site?

I do perform a reset password operation, which will hopefully lock out the bad guys too, and that's that.
From here on out, my Facebook account will be dormant again until they let me log in with a reset password only, without asking for a birth date that is close to my real one but not my real one, without asking a security question that is so secure that even I have forgotten the answer.

Is is so hard for companies to ask you if your email account is safe?

Or to delete an account if it has not been active for a year? Sure, maybe you spent the last year in a coma, in prison, or on that expedition in the Amazon.

If the public knew how many social networking accounts are zombie accounts, maybe those of us who do not spend a good part of their workday on Facebook could see that are not reclusive nay sayers to progress.

But it's okay, marketing folks like big numbers, and they need to feed their families, too.


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