If you trust Facebook with your life online, with your daily activities, with your precious personal photos, with your identification. Beware. Facebook identify theft is real. Beyond identify theft, Facebook can eliminate your existence at any time without warning or remedy. If your name triggers their robots that scan for unusual names, you are gone, just like that. Your identity is gone. Your friends are gone. If you relied on Facebook for business connections, your business is gone. Your income is gone. Poof, in an instant. Your personal photos, all gone. People can write eulogies on your wall in memory of who you once were on Facebook. It happens all the time.
Worst of all, Facebook will not respond so there is only one way for legitimate people or businesses to try to get back their professional or personal material they posted. The only way is to upload your private government identification to their servers. Not to an individual real person who assures you that your government identification will be treated with the utmost confidentiality, but to the cloud, the internet, the Facebook servers. Trust the Corporation with everything, Facebook is literally the big brother we were warned about.
Facebook owns your identity and whatever you post on the site and can take it away at any time for many reasons and there is no legal recourse because it is a private corporation. For advocates of privatization, that is the risk of too much privatization of your personal life. You let them own you. You become a slave to their whims.
For instance, take their "fake name policy." Their robots bann people for unusual names. Many Native Americans cannot have a Facebook account under their legal names. The trouble is the Facebook Corporate robots are arbitrary. For example, Do you think Nawly Booger is a real name? Facebook allows two of them.
What they are doing in their blind Corporate Media way, is turning people off to both Facebook and social media in general. even people who were completely emmersed in social media both personally and professionally like Elmo Keep, Writer and Social Media Educator and Former Advocate. Facebook convinced her to send a upload of her driver's license and passport to their server, not even to a human, just to get access to more than a thousand articles she had posted there so she could keep her freelance writing business and both professional and personal friends.
The whole experience has led Keep to question the sense in relying so heavily on social networking sites and entrusting a faceless corporation with so much of our personal information. As she said:
"People take for granted I think that it is a service provided by a corporate but because it features such familiarity of your own and it is that idea of a 'my space' that you've created, you kind of forget that it is actually a business model controlled by someone else as they see fit," she said.
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