> In what world does anyone care about meta impersonation anymore?
My 84 yr old mother does. It really annoys her when someone steals her profile picture, makes an account in her name and starts sending friend requests to her friends. I told her Facebook could fix this easily but they don't want to.
Now I can tell her they want to charge her to fix it.
Will this actually solve this? Her account may be verified but that doesn't stop another unverified account from spoofing her.
The announcement mentions "impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you" but I'm skeptical how advanced that's going to be. It can't stop name reuse (because real people have the same name). And preventing someone creating a second account with the same image would be perfectly possible today, with no verification system, so I doubt that's it either.
It’s a chicken and egg problem. You want people to start ignoring unverified accounts and make the social expectation that only verified accounts are good. But people. won’t do so until it’s common.
Once established it’s a great network effect. But networks with effects are hard to start.
You are assuming that everyone the spoofer contacts is going to know that grandma is a verified user and so this can't be her. Of course, the vast majority of people would not give it a second thought and so this would have no effect on the spoofing problem.
Keeps happening to my family members as well. For all of them their initial response is to tell all their contacts that they have been hacked, their anti-virus has failed and they have changed all their passwords on all sites... I keep telling them they have not been hacked, it is just Meta/Facebook being inexcusable poor at detecting obvious new cloned accounts.
Some just panicked and closed their accounts making the fake one the only one with their name left on FB...
I can't imagine any of them wanting to pay to be verified to avoid this though.
It's happened to my mother several times. Nearest I can tell, they want to see her non-public posts for advertising purposes and this is why Facebook doesn't fix it. More money for them. It causes her a significant amount of distress, so simply put, Mark Zuckerberg abuses the elderly.
My 84 yr old mother does. It really annoys her when someone steals her profile picture, makes an account in her name and starts sending friend requests to her friends. I told her Facebook could fix this easily but they don't want to.
Now I can tell her they want to charge her to fix it.