Chip Anderson

Facebook isn't Free

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Yesterday, we held a StockCharts Hat giveaway on our Facebook page as part of our 15 year anniversary celebration.  It was a ton of fun seeing our Facebook friends quickly snap up the 15 hats we offered on the page.  We then started to contact the winners asking for their shipping information.

Facebook decided that was a no-no.

Why?  We have no idea.  Shouldn't Facebook know that we are a legit company by this point?  Probably - we've been using them for 5+ years now to promote our site AND we've paid them lots of money to advertise on their site.

Regardless, Facebook suddenly locked our account and demanded that we send them a photo of a valid "government issued photo ID" in order to have our account unlocked.  Now, I don't know about you - but that raised all kinds of issues with me.

  1. We're a business.  Businesses don't have government issued photo IDs.
  2. Facebook should know who we are by now.
  3. Contacting people that "Like" us and commented on our page is not strange or unusual.
  4. It is a HUGE invasion of privacy to require someone to send a photo of their driver's license over the Internet, ever.
  5. Photos of ID cards can easily be faked.
  6. I'm trying to have a business relationship with Facebook - our social page is important to us and our users - yet they treat me, literally, like a criminal.  "License and registration please."

But here's the kicker - what can we do?  Our Facebook page is important and currently, we can't do anything to it.  We can't even delete it(!).  So I sent Facebook a "redacted" version of my ID in protest.  We'll see what happens.  For now we have no choice but to wait until the "powers that be" decide our fate.

The real losers are our Facebook followers because until this is resolved, we can't do any more of the fun 15-year giveaways we were planning.  We're looking into doing those giveaways in some other manner.  Stay tuned.

Facebook isn't free.

- Chip

 

Chip Anderson
About the author: is the founder and president of StockCharts.com. He founded the company after working as a Windows developer and corporate consultant at Microsoft from 1987 to 1997. In this blog, Chip shares his tips and tricks on how to maximize the tools and resources available at StockCharts.com, and provides updates about new features or additions to the site. Learn More
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I started a FB account severl years ago to keep up with my kids, and a friend of mine messaged me, saying "Welcome to another way to waste lots of time." Now my kids are grown and I might find a use for FB with SC, but hearing storied like this one make me want to close my FB account if they can't do better than this.
Overreach is a common with big bureaucracies. They loose sight of their mission of service.
I am starting off in my fifth year with StockCharts and am still a very satisfied member --never have been a FB user, and after reading about your recent episode with it, I`m betting I never will be!
It happens when business is run by a kid...
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