If you enjoy this article, see the other most popular articles

If you enjoy this article, see the other most popular articles

If you enjoy this article, see the other most popular articles

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I am angry. I will walk you through the steps of what has happened. Here is the historical background:

1.) In late 2008, I signed up for Facebook.

2.) In early 2012 I deactivated my account.

3.) On March 14th, 2017, Facebook suddenly reactivated my account. I received this email:

I have done nothing to reactivate my account. I do not want an account on Facebook. I have been happy to live without Facebook for the last 5 years. The email says “If you were not the one who reactivated this account, please visit our Help Center.” I click that link and it asks me to login. I try the old password that I used on unimportant accounts a few years ago:

I try another old password, which I used to use for unimportant accounts, and they recognize this second password.

I am concerned that they knew that I used this password on several different sites. How did they know that? I suppose they keep an automated list of passwords that have been hacked on other sites, when those hacked passwords are made public? If so, that much is reasonable. I hope that is what is going on. (I certainly hope they didn’t buy some other site of which I was a member, and then perhaps they found that the other site was keeping the passwords as plain text).

I’m willing to change my password so I can log in and delete my Facebook account. However, they do not offer a wealth of options for verifying my account:

What kind of photo ID do they want?

In other words, I can not cancel my account, except by giving them a government issued ID. I do not want to give this information to Facebook — this is an invasion of my privacy.

I try to get around their restrictions by feeding them a random image:

No luck. They are going to verify this:

To summarize:

1.) After 5 years, Facebook suddenly reactivated my account.

2.) I do not want a Facebook account. I simply want to log in and delete the account.

3.) Facebook won’t let me log in unless I give them a government issued ID.

4.) I do not want to give Facebook a government issued ID. This is an invasion of my privacy.

Also: Facebook has started to send me an email every time one of my friends uploads an image or comments on a status. I assume these were the email settings that I had in place during the era of 2008 to 2012. I feel frustrated that I can not change my email settings without first giving Facebook a government ID.