I have to admit. It’s not easy. I feel like I’ve been moved to Alcatraz and put in solitary confinement. FB has become the way to keep in touch with what’s going on in other people’s lives and I’m suddenly in the dark because I don’t get the updates anymore.

It’s sad that I didn’t get a chance to tell my friends on FB goodbye. I’m not sure why I’m lamenting that because I don’t think I told most of them goodbye when we left school/work. Most people on FB are just people you know. Most not very well cos the people you know well are likely to be the people you still talk to or meet over meals/poker/mahjong/drinks/movies/<insert random social activity>.

But it was fun knowing what they have been up to, looking in on their lives via photo albums and status updates. Actually, I think the key thing is that it makes having friends more effortless – there’s no need to do the summarize-what-happened-in-the-last-decade/year/month/week sorta catchup. Dropping an occasional comment on their walls/updates/albums suffices…. You must know what I’m talking about….

I’m ashamed to say that there’s comfort in even looking at my mother’s someone else’s facebook page.

“Hi there Status Update – I missed you! Oh and you Photo Album. Whose are you? I’ll take a look anyway. “

The thought of starting a new FB account has crossed my mind not a few times because I suspect I’m addicted think FB works as a social networking site. But at the moment, I refuse to bow down to FB’s privacy policy and BS excuse of a reason for disabling my account. The only good thing that’s come out of it, is that I’m not online as much which is good because I actually do non virtual stuff. You must realise that time disappears when one is uploading pics, tagging /commenting on albums, and looking in on other people’s lives, right?

Let’s see how long I can last.

Early last week, my FB account was disabled with no warning. I followed the link on the login page to write in for a quick restoration to what I believed must have been a mistake. They wrote back with :

“Your account has been temporarily suspended because it lists a fake date of birth. Providing false information on your account is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”
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Now, I don’t remember listing a fake DOB. In fact, since my birthday just went by, the number of well wishers on my wall would prove that it was indeed a real birthdate. But since I missed my friends on FB being obliging, I did. Then they sent this :

“Thanks for providing this information. At this time, we cannot verify the ownership of the account. Please reply to this email with a scanned or digital image of a government-issued ID (e.g., driver’s license). Please make sure the following information is clear:

- Date of birth
- Photo
- Full name”

I was alarmed so instead of replying to the email, I wrote to disabled@facebook.com to ask if this was standard practice. The same person replied with this :

“Hi,
We apologize, but the only way we will be able to verify ownership of this account is if you reply to this email with an attachment of scanned, government-issued photo identification confirming your full name and date of birth…..”

and ended the email with

“Thanks in advance for understanding this security policy.

Arwen
User Operations
Facebook”

Seriously Arwen, you write an email asking for my identification and I don’t even get your last name? How about You send Me a government issued ID? And shouldn’t this security policy be enforced when one sets up the account and not after eons?

On a side note, although I doubt people will send in their ID for a social networking site, I agree that such a security policy would be good so people cannot pretend to be who they are not.

That said, I wouldn’t send mine to FB not even if they can ‘restart’ their system (there’re so many fake accounts there!). Have you heard the news of FB profiting off the private data of their 150m users (That info is from Telegraph! Must be legit)? Do I dare send them my ID even if I wasn’t replying hackers?

Anyway, I wrote back a long email (too long to paste here) declining their request. I even asked if I could log back in for just a day to retrieve some pictures.

*Sigh*  I really miss being on FB, but weighing that against online fraud/identify theft, I can deal with not being on FB.

Twitter, you’re all I have now.

PS: I will update further correspondences from FB(if any).