Macworld Forums: Facebook reports 80 million accounts are bogus - Macworld Forums

Post your comments for Facebook reports 80 million accounts are bogus here

I am in a third category. I created a fake account in order to be able to comment on news sites like LATimes.com who only allow comments by facebook users.

The question is what are they going to do about it? Are they going to cancel these accounts? You can assume that a lot of them are legit and their algorithm for detecting false accounts is off. They can't possibly have human eyes examine more than a few percent of these 80 million accounts on an individual basis.

OK - I'll confess, my dog has a facebook account. It's manned by my wife and me, and we don't have our own accounts. A few years ago, the account was "suspended" twice for some vague reason regarding authenticity. Each time, I just had to send an email from my dog's email account asking "why was my account suspended?" and it was reinstated. And yes, my dog wasn't 13 even in dog years when he got the account. Neither were my kids or most of their friends when they got accounts.

Yes, we are violating the TOS, but I have no interest in having an account with my real name and being "found" by people I haven't spoken to in 30 years. On the other hand, my dog hasn't spammed anyone, bullied them, or even unfriended them. Or bitten them. My kids have behaved as well (they are required to friend us, and the cool thing is, since it's our dog's page, most of our kids friends have no problem friending us as well).

The point is Facebook never had any serious way to enforce this, and they are way past the point of being able to get any of this under control.

And I'm in a fourth category. I created an account using my chat handle, so that I would not be impersonated by anyone who might take that name. Like btb83 and Extensor, I do not have an account under my legal name. And that one account I did register never does anything. Never even looks at other FB pages.

I see others questioning how Facebook is going to do anything about this. But missing from the article -- as far as I can see -- is that they care about purging these things en masse. To me, it sounds like they're just trying to measure them.

Which totally makes sense. If you're a public company and you're reporting X accounts, you'd better give a good faith accurate measurement of how many real people X actually represents.

I have yet another category. I created 3 FB accts with fake identities in order to play Farmville and Mafia Wars, back when I played those. Those accounts are still active, but I sign in only to check if they're working.

"Fakebook"

Maybe if they didn't make it so hard to advance in the games without bugging your friends who have no interest they might not have this problem. There's also the security issue but that's another story.