Facebook (Again)
Danny Piccirillo posted the following on his blog yesterday:
If it hasn’t happened to you, you’ve heard the stories. Facebook can suspend or disable your account at any time with or without warning and/or explanation. Although there are some legitimate reasons and spammers who should be banned, most of the time honest users are victim.
Well, I can’t really see the logic of Facebook disabling the accounts of honest users. What possible benefits would it bring Facebook? All it would do is stir up controversy and make people hate them, which is not good for business. The question of their selection process also pops into my head. If they are disabling the accounts of honest users, how would they pick which accounts to disable? I can’t see them just randomly browsing Facebook and disabling people at random. Again, what’s the point? So, why does it happen?
Newsweek recently ran an article on Facebook’s ‘internal police’, looking through reported content and deleting what has to be deleted. Out of a staff of 850, 150 make up this group - over 17% of Facebook’s payroll. Most of the content they review seems to be reported by users. I imagine many of the reasons accounts are disabled is over this sort of content. As the article says, they have rules on what is and isn’t allowed. Whether they tell users those rules is another matter.
Again, from Danny’s blog:
We’ve entrusted Facebook with a lot of our information. Our groups, our schedules, our friends, messages, pictures, videos, etc, etc, etc. They can’t have the power to remove us and erase all of our stuff for no reason!
They do have that power though. When you sign up, you grant them that power. Everyone blindly clicks “I Agree” or ticks the little checkbox “Yes, I’ve read the terms and conditions” for every website, but how many people actually read the Terms and Conditions, the Privacy Policy, the Terms of Service and whatever other legalese is around on the site? Perhaps everyone should in future.
Also, providing a list of groups you’re a member of, your full schedule, a list of your friends, your private and public messages to one another, your photos and videos and whatever else people are giving to Facebook, is entirely the member’s choice.
This just made me laugh:
Please join this group in protest:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=111455542032
If I was that annoyed with a company, I stop using them. Perhaps drop them a message like I did with Virgin Mobile. I certainly wouldn’t just carry on using it, especially against itself. People have got too hooked on Facebook. So much so that even when people truly hate them for whatever reason, they just can’t give it up. Perhaps we need some form of Facebook Rehab?