Short story to support your articles.

I used a fake name on FB since the first day I signed up along with a photo of my favorite rock star. About a year ago, someone outed me and FB locked my account and said unless I emailed them a copy of my drivers license or some form of identification that proved who I was, they would keep my account locked.

I thought, "Whatever, I'll just fire up a new one."

This past month I signed up a new account under a very generic name like "John Johnson". No problems. I never uploaded a photo, just connected with the handful of people (less than 5) and felt like, "ok, we're cool now".

Yesterday, I got the same message and now the links you provided make a lot of sense as to why. FB really is after all of your data and essentially force you to give it to them, otherwise they hold your account hostage. Both times, I really felt like my privacy was being stampeded and this was a big intrusion to get at my personal information. No way am I going to give you an identifiable information about me. I already gave up an account I had used more or less for a decade instead of coughing up my personal information and photo.

So yeah, I'm done with FB - not that I was ever a huge fan, but this past week just confirmed what I always suspected.

Sure that's scary. But it also sounds like 'anti-fraud'. How could we distinguish the two? They're slammed if they want authentic accounts; they're slammed if folks create large numbers of spam accounts. How do we suppose they could win in this scenario?

Just do like most of the social media accounts do.

Have algorithms that detect spam? Let users report on accounts being used to spam other users?

Sure, if I'm someone abusing the system, this should be easy to ferret out without having to surrender all your personal information and identifying markers just to make a SOCIAL MEDIA platform free of spam.

I don't know this for a fact, but if I were FB I think I'd be fanatical about verifying real users to prevent people setting up social media PBNs. A holy grail of grey-hat SEO nowadays would be to control large networks of interlinked fake social media accounts, which could be used to promote content artificially. This kind of spam is potentially hard to detect since the networks could be very large and appear organic (to the point, theoretically, of having AI-driven "users" behind each one), so the first line of defence is to identify fake user accounts.

Thanks for the links. I had heard of some of those issues but the sleep tracking and unsent text collection were new to me.