Facebook: watch out for third-party page edit requests

Two years ago, I received an ominous e-mail from Facebook:

“Peope who recently visited your page recommended changes to the information on your page. Please verify the information below for accuracy. [List of changes.] If we don’t hear from you before [11 days from now], the information in question will be automatically updated.”

Users can tell Facebook to change your page.

This change will happen automatically unless you stop it; the change request is not a suggestion to you, but an instruction to Facebook.

Facebook will give you a short time to review and reject this instruction, namely 11 days. If somebody who wants to harm you, knows you are on holiday for instance, they have plenty of time to change your page.

No notification of this appears on Facebook itself. Instead you receive an e-mail from Facebook. This is problematic for at least two reasons I can think of. One is that you can unsubscribe from this type of e-mail, which you may have done for a variety of reasons. The other is that the e-mail comes from Facebookmail.com, a domain that was plagued by spam a couple of years ago, so a lot of people have blocked mail from this domain as a matter of fact.

Basically, and this is not the first time I have noticed this, Facebook outsources as much manual labour as they can get away with.

Also interesting is that Facebook sees Pages as a largely commercial product. Anybody can set up as many free pages as they like, but from then on will be flooded with requests to buy page views. The message is clear: if you want people to view your page, you will have to pay for it.

I have no solution for this, other than to not bet the farm on Facebook. If information is important enough for you to present on the internet, make sure all of it can be found outside of Facebook.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Web design + usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.