Hi, today I want to talk about how to really mess up friendships with Facebook. No this isn’t so that you can go an use it on people, but because it’s a flaw which I think people should be aware of.
First we have to understand a little known feature of Facebook:
Facebook doesn’t want it’s users leaving. That bit is obvious. So instead of encouraging you to delete your profile and delete all the comments you’ve posted over the years, they suggest you disable it. This means that they still have everything and get simply reinstate you if you come back and decide actually you like the book of faces.
Now I actually don’t think this is such a bad idea. Despite my loathing of facebook the company, I don’t like the idea of people deleting their archives of social interactions. I’m in favour of keeping your letters, birthday cards, photos. Sure keeping them on Facebook is epic privacy fail, but that’s out of the scope of this article.
However, consider the following scenario:
- Alice and Bob become friends on Facebook.
- Bob disables his Facebook account.
- Alice and Bob fall out.
- Alice no longer wants Bob to have access to her Facebook account.
- Alice tries to delete Bob from her friends list, but Bob isn’t in it. (His account is disabled; he won’t show up)
- Alice posts stuff she doesn’t want Bob to see.
- Bob re-enables his facebook account.
- Bob is still friends with Alice, Alice is unaware he is able to access her profile until he shows up in her newsfeed.
- Bob is able to see all of Alice’s updates of the same permissions he was able to before he disabled his account.
And there you have it. A really easy way of being really shitty.
I don’t like it, I’m not sure what I’d suggest facebook did, but yeah; it sucks.