Reuters Money
Facebook hijacked: Will anyone there answer the phone?
Like about three-quarters of a billion other folks, Elisa Zuritsky enjoyed connecting to her friends and family through Facebook. Then, on Memorial Day Weekend, someone hijacked her account and she learned what untold others have: Facebook doesn’t have a phone number to help you work out your problems.
After a couple of months of emails, pleas for help and even blogging about her frustration of trying to get back what she’d lost, Zuritsky’s Facebook page was still tied up by the scam artist who had been sending messages to her friends and family asking them for money. Zuritsky, a TV producer and writer, was supposedly in London and in desperate need of cash.
From New York, and only in desperate need of a Facebook fix, Zuritsky says it has been painfully frustrating to get emails directing her to do the same things over and over again, only to end up with the same result.
“How about a number that you call? I don’t understand,” she says. “What’s the problem? They can afford to have a team of people who are troubleshooting for their frustrated users.”
Being able to afford to and actually doing that are two different things. Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens says the company decided its electronic-only approach is the way to go.
“Consistent with the practices of other major providers of free online services, we offer email and Web-based support for Facebook because it enables us to most effectively and efficiently serve our over 750 million users worldwide,” he says.
Zuritsky’s not alone in her upset over the policy. Complaint boards are littered with unhappy users who just want to talk to a human being. Here’s one recent comment:
Facebook photo tagging: Cool or creepy?
If your face is among the hundreds of millions of images on Facebook — by your own doing or not — you’ve got a stake in a worldwide debate over a technical change that has privacy advocates in a lather.
The colossal social network has been adding facial recognition software to its arsenal to automate the practice known as tagging, or adding people’s names to photos. Facebook already possesses a massive database of images connected to names that would continue to grow from the photos you add and the names you associate unless you specifically reject the practice.
Facebook has already acknowledged it is cooperating with regulators in the European Union, who have raised questions. And now the company is facing a call for an investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and other privacy groups have joined together to file a complaint with the FTC after Facebook said it was using biometrics and had been rolling out the technology for months.
Facebook say there’s nothing wrong with what it’s doing and that for any user concerned about privacy issues there’s an easy out.
“We launched Tag Suggestions to assist people when they are tagging their friends in photos. We announced the tool in December 2010, and it was covered widely,” the company said in a statement. “Now that we have begun to roll this out more widely, we are notifying people of its availability, and how it works. Tag Suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested. No action is taken on a person’s behalf, and all suggestions can be ignored. ”
The company said the feature has already led to the addition of “hundreds of millions of tags. This data, and the fact that we’ve had almost no user complaints, suggests people are enjoying the feature and are finding it useful.”
No wonder the public doesn’t complain about the phone and email tapping powers the government has under the “Patriot” act — we are so conditioned to living in the fishbowl called Facebook. FB and FBI are becoming hard to distinguish.
Virtual currencies are coming for your cash
Facebook’s announcement that it will sell goods through its own virtual currency called Credits – 10 of them equal $1 – seems an elaborate way to make you pay for everyday items such as DVDs.
Then there are video games that encourage you to spend real money on virtual items. Yes, really. The bottom line is both can make you part with more dollars than you mean to.
Dollars by any other name
Facebook is ramping up its Credits currency, particularly through recently announced daily discounts venture Facebook Deals, which is already rolling out in San Francisco, Austin, Atlanta, Dallas and San Diego. From July, Credits will be the only online payment processing system available for its gaming platform.
And Facebook is not the only one turning your dollars into in-house funds. Groupon already uses Groupon Bucks. Then there’s Google, who bought virtual payment firm Jambool last August, and are currently testing Google Offers in Portland and soon in New York and San Francisco.
But why the sudden rush to get you to use virtual currencies? The answer is simple, says Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher in virtual goods, currencies and economies at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.
“The benefit to the company is in the psychology of consumption,” says Lehdonvirta. “When you replace national currency with credits, it makes it more difficult for consumers to understand prices and the value of goods.”
Facebook scam warning pages under fire
If you spend any time on Facebook, you’ve probably seen some of the many scams directed at users.
It’s simple: You are an obvious target if you are on Facebook. Being part of the world’s largest social network makes you extra vulnerable to scammers because it is a social network, and clicking on and joining things is part of the game.
The scams take many forms. It can be a game that one of your friends supposedly asked you to play, a photograph that you were told you must look at or even an image of yourself that you’re told is in someone else’s photo album. Others appear to be part of big company giveaways, like one that purported to be from IKEA. Tens of thousands of people often fall for these scams, leaving their names and faces on the phony pages because they thought they were going to get something if they did.
The scams sometimes simply seek to annoy users, while many more are far darker — aimed at gaining access to the significant amount of personal information that many users post for only their friends to see. Users are also sometimes induced into downloading malicious software. Many of the scams can lead to identity theft.
Irked that Facebook isn’t more aggressive when it comes to scam prevention, some users have built well-followed Facebook pages that warn about scams. At least two of those pages — Scam Sniper and The Bulldog Estate — were disabled this week for alleged terms-of-service violations.
Scam Sniper was taken down for half a day and Bulldog Estate was knocked out for more than three days.
“As of now, the fans of my page, Scam Sniper, feel betrayed by Facebook,” said Joshua Brunson, who runs Scam Sniper. “They feel scam artists are given room to do whatever they like. This feeling has been fortified over the last few days due to the fact that Facebook seems to react swiftly to remove sites like Scam Sniper or The Bulldog Estate based on ‘terms violations,’ but leave scam pages, apps, groups and pedophiles to stay on the network as long as they like.”
Google+ will replace Facebook in short order.