Facebook - what do I tell my wife?
Our church is shortly to establish a social media presence, courtesy of Mrs. Andras and a few others who think this will be a good thing, and they have met together and got an 'expert' to come one day next week to show what can be done in Facebook.
Consequently, and rather against my better judgement, I finally yielded to persuasion and decided to sign up to the wretched thing, as the expert wants us all to have our own accounts set up before the meeting.
And so today at my own desktop computer that no-one else uses I duly went to sign up, giving my name, date of birth and email address as requested; at which point the half-witted program told me that I was Mrs. Andras (all of whose details are differerent) and showed me all her postings etc.
Obviously the programming has been done by incompetent half-wits making errors of the sort that a five-year-old would regard as risible, and I'm now a convinced non-user of the stupid thing.
So exactly how do I now tell her that I want nothing more to do with it ever without making it look as if I'm just trying to get out of a planned session with this expert?
Consequently, and rather against my better judgement, I finally yielded to persuasion and decided to sign up to the wretched thing, as the expert wants us all to have our own accounts set up before the meeting.
And so today at my own desktop computer that no-one else uses I duly went to sign up, giving my name, date of birth and email address as requested; at which point the half-witted program told me that I was Mrs. Andras (all of whose details are differerent) and showed me all her postings etc.
Obviously the programming has been done by incompetent half-wits making errors of the sort that a five-year-old would regard as risible, and I'm now a convinced non-user of the stupid thing.
So exactly how do I now tell her that I want nothing more to do with it ever without making it look as if I'm just trying to get out of a planned session with this expert?
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Comments
The best use I put FB to is advertising - it works very well for that.
Just tell her not to bother wasting her time.
I must admit that I prefer parish websites to a Facebook presence, and would not spend the time on a Facebook training. Facebook makes it too easy to see how out of date the page is, and doesn't appear to offer those nicely built in pages for "what to expect", "what we believe", education coming up, etc. The parish in which I currently fill-in has a Facebook page, showing they welcomed people for Christmas Eve 2014, Palm Sunday 2015, and Christmas Eve 2016. My old parish with a vigrous website has all those nice little links and tabs that let the church shopper, or member, easily access information that may be helpful.
The FB page was useful for telling people that we were open when it snowed as - unlike a website - notifications got sent to quite a few folk (and, again, the community site flagged it up). And, although we haven't used it much for this, it can be used for offering comment on current events in the locality - one local Vicar made a good comment on his page when a Terrorist was found to have been living in the area.
Should anyone counter, you simply say "I have spoken" and let that be the end of it.
Our Place is having an FB page/group/whatyoumaycallit set up, by our churchwarden, but in the meantime a member of the congregation, who uses FB a great deal, is very good at sending out details of our special services, events etc. to literally hundreds of contacts.
It's hard to tell what effect this has, but I do know that we have had people turn up for services or events, having heard thereof via the Volume of Visage.
I agree, however, that Andras should (if he really is uneasy about the whole thing) tell Mrs. Andras that He Washes His Hands Of The Matter.
IJ
FB is ubiquitous and even if you're not using it, have no connection with it, like Google tracking people who use none of its services, it tracks you anyway.
From the OP:
IJ
Is it possible
is the question, even with
that assertion of?
Having said that, it is very common and quite acceptable for a person to say they want nothing to do with Facebook and refuse to make an account. I wouldn't think it would offend or upset Mrs Andras. You could tell her you've heard it's really easy for people to click the wrong things and confuse people.
It certainly did log me in as her, and even sent her an email (to my email address!) telling her that her password had changed. Why they didn't send it to her - different - email address (with a different provider) I can't begin to imagine, but I suppose it's all part of the general air of total incompetence that surrounds their coding. Lord, if in my programming days I'd written software that behaved like that, I'd expect to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
In the end I just let the good lady read this thread, and then announced that I was renouncing the devil and all his works, or something like that. She was in turn amused and then very angry, though not with me. She's still smarting at having had to change her login details on her tablet.
At least I know now that I'll never waste another minute wondering if I should sign up!
If you and Mrs. Andras would like some virtual Holy Water and Incense sent by virtual post, please let me know.....
Meanwhile, full marks for renouncing the Devil and all his works!
IJ
Perhaps the Necronomicon of Abdul Al-Hazred may be of use, too......(let the reader of American horror fiction understand)
IJ
IJ
Ah gosh, that does sound odd, and since you've been a programmer unlikely that you'd accidentally clicked the wrong thing or misunderstood. Good idea showing Mrs Andras the thread. Hope all is sorted now, in that your decision not to be on Facebook is accepted and hasn't caused any bad feeling.
I’d suggest your church think about the purpose of the web presence. Is it just to communicate with fellow parishioners? If so, Facebook would be handy as a sort of cyber bulletin board. Some denominations have guidelines for usage, to protect the church or the denomination from difficulties based on what members might post there.
What I look for in checking a church’s website is a combination of “set in stone things” (service times, which have music, is there child care or a Sunday School and when, what education programs are coming up, do you have sermons posted anywhere on line, etc.), and “upcoming things”. (yard sale Saturday, Clergy person on vacation So-and-so filling in, etc. )
For that you need a good consultant, and a local person trained to keep it up to date. Our local diocesan communications officer is a gem at helping a parish get some ideas of what they want, and quick to develop a website. Yes, some may look similar to another, but they do that job of offering the kind of information I, for one, would be looking for.
Good luck with this new venture!
If signed into Chrome under the same account then all bets are off.
One point is that I can't remove / delete my account because I don't have one (and now never will)! FB just illegally (literally so, as far as I can see) logged me into Mrs. Andras' account, although none of our details match except for our surnames, but never actually opened one for me.
Fools!
* because she is the only person in Jamaica called this she has this touching belief that she's the only person in the world with this name, so of course when she sets up a Microsoft or email account she will have the first account with that name. Well too bad, too late. But using that account tries to hijack it, causing my daughter trying to work on a laptop using that same account to lock it all down and the Jamaican nurse ends up with problems, which she moans about on Facebook - like being locked out of the Microsoft account she thought she'd set up using an email that wasn't hers with double protection. To the extent she had to take the laptop to be reset back to factory settings professionally, which is why the iPad.
(And, of course, most of the people to whom I say this are members of my church.)
It could simply be that Mrs. Andras did indeed log into facebook on your machine previously.
In fact, I'd bet on it.
Or so he thinks...
Quick! Clear browser history! (Too late.)
Even if that were true - and Mrs. Andras has never even logged into this machine and doesn't have the password to do so - it is actually irrelevant.
As someone who in a past life did this professionally, I positively know that if someone tells a site that they want to set up a new account, then the first thing the software should check is whether name, d.o.b., password and email address all match an existing record - not a cookie, but an actual off-the-machine record.
If they do, then it's not a new account; if they don't, then perhaps it is.
So how come the alleged geniuses at Facebook see a new account request in which all those things are different and assume that it's ok to log into an existing account with a different name and a different password?
To which the only answer is that the software is faulty in the sense that it's poorly specified. A ten-year-old could do better.
Facebook privacy issues tend to be more when they change privacy settings and people don’t realise, or people accidentally make all their future posts public, because they make one post public and don’t realise they have to reset privacy for the next post.
I do come across a few people who get scared that FB has some kind of magical powers and it always turns out there is a logical explanation. And there are a lot of scaremongering, misleading memes that suggest such magical powers - along with Snopes articles that explain their falsity.
The thing with FB is you do have to click on all the settings, and observe all the details, and make sure you figure it all out. The privacy settings are pretty good when you do that, but it’s fiddly finding it all at first, so lots of people don’t.
But Facebook does do some scary shit. After not having an account for many years, I created a completely new account with no family history on a new computer with a new email address. I might have even given a fake dob - I sometimes do that when I don't think services need to know my personal details. I then signed up to a few gardening and other interest Facebook groups.
And with all of that, the first friend suggestion it gave was my daughter. It was astonishing - there was nothing to link us than a surname.
It would be fascinating to see if this could be replicated. If it happened exactly as stated, then the only explanation is that they are logging you in via your IP address - which is obviously not good.
5,7,5.
The hour has come, love
for me to lay down my head.
I'll see you later.
I once did a haiku version of a famous Sappho poem as follows (and yes, it is ©!)
Pleiades and moon
have set / midnight / time passes
and I lie alone.
Somewhere dark, intimate, warm
I am bored of you.
Yes there was. Several things actually.
First,
your browser has a unique signature. FB, without cookies, without anything, knows that your browser has accessed FB before because it knows your browser. If your daughter had ever ever even once logged in from the same browser, it knows about that too.
If you are curious what your browser is doing, visit https://panopticlick.eff.org/ and hit "test me", then on the results page, click on "Show full results for fingerprinting". The results may surprise you, in terms of how you're being tracked. The result for "Hash of canvas fingerprint" identifies your browser- Everywhere on the 'net.
Second,
I have been accused of being paranoid about security, but consider: if you access FB or Google etc from a computer, it identifies the computer and user, and then you login from a phone, and it links the two browsers together because both have fingerprints. The you put apps on your phone, and they also track and link via fingerprints or logins from the app, and this is shared with Google or Apple because you got the app from Google Play or the iStore. And FB is an app isn't it? Altogether sharing sharing sharing about you.
Third,
you don't have to have FB on your phone for FB to track you. Android for instance has embedded within "mtqq-mini.mint.facebook" which identifies and locates you many times each day whether you have FB installed on it or not. I counted just more than 200x a day when I monitored it for 24 hours on an Android phone. Google does the same. So consider: you have a phone, a computer browser, and your daughter has logged into the same Wifi, or is connected to the same cellphone towers using data. Voila, the FB and Google connected you to her.
Fourth, and beyond this thread, whatever....
The same deal occurs when you visit a store. FB and Google know your phone was in that store - don't know if they're targetting specific locations within stores yet - and then you pay for the things with a card (debit or credit) or give a loyalty points card number at checkout. Now your purchases are linked to you, your phone, your browser, because the credit cared company or bank does what with your purchase data? And you've logged into the loyalty site with what browser from phone and computer. So then you get an advert on FB and you wonder how it knew to flog that ad to you. And maybe your daughter also was in that store, even perhaps at the same time as you, and it's happened from several stores and locations. -- and we're told recently that tracking they said wasn't happening actually is, like perhaps you text your daughter and they've linked up the two of you that way.
One piece of reading in The Guardian which describes part of this.
This was a new device, never before accessed Facebook. My daughter does not access Facebook and never accessed Facebook on that device.
The only possible connection is owr shared IP. As I said above if you'd actually read what I said.
= sufficient
And if you'd read what I wrote, if your daughter has a "smart phone" without having FB installed on it or every accessing FB, the phone actually provides info to FB via a little program on the phone called mtqq-mini.mint.facebook, which is on the phone, embedded in the operating system on the phone. No FB required. Thus FB can put two users together who don't use the app, don't have FB accounts.
But there's something wrong with the information you've provided. In your last response you said
and previously
How could it offer your daughter to you as a friend without an account on FB? Whatever sinister nonsense FB's up to, it doesn't create accounts for people who've never had one.
It is actually simple: my daughter accessed Facebook on her devices. I had a completely separate device - which wasn't a phone and which she never used - where I signed up for Facebook and the first friend suggestion was my daughter.
The only link was the IP address. I don't care if you believe it or not, it is the truth.
Still think that Mrs. Andras used Andras' machine to log into FB. And, statistically, probably to access pr0n.
Rev T updates ours about three times a week - to remind people about the service, the food bank, toddlers and anything special going on. Some of the material gets shared to the various community groups in the village. Reaching people who wouldn't see it otherwise. All good.
You don't have to be on FB. Like most things, if you like it, then do it. If you don't then why bother. (I take myself off twitter every so often because it gets so angry and that does my head in).