I stopped using Facebook 6 years ago and haven't gotten a single email / sms from them since then, because I used the settings properly.
Yeah, if you just ghost them and never click "update your email settings" at the bottom of every email they send, they'll keep sending them.
So I feel the GP's pain, I've taken to marking them as spam as well because I know that my settings aren't guaranteed to stay where they are. It's not even in Facebook's best interest to try and keep my notification settings where they are.
At some point or another they decided to expand this to include re-engagement garbage like "{{Some person you haven't interacted with in 10 years}} {{ commented on their status || uploaded a photo || added a video}}!", so now I've turned off everything but security alerts.
My current frustration is how they won't let you get notifications about new messages by email. I don't want the app, I don't want to 'delete' my account since we know it doesn't really remove anything and I'd rather retain a semblance of control, but I also don't want to leave the occasional person hanging who tries to contact me via Facebook Messenger, since people can still message you even if you mark yourself 'offline'.
I know this is completely intentional and designed to get me to install the Messenger app and look at their ads, but damn if it doesn't grind my gears. If I could go back to 2005 I never would have made a Facebook account to begin with.
Microsoft/Gates also had trouble with this. What is "business hardball" in a startup, can be illegal conduct in an almost-monopoly.
In a kitten, pouncing aggression is cute... in a liger, not so much. For the same behavior, you'd put it down.
Individuals can similarly fail to recognize transitions. "You can't do X." "But I've been doing X for years!" "Yes, but here you have relationship Y, so X is no longer ethical/legal."
It's weird to expect that deleting your account will result in the account being deleted and notifications for the account you no longer have to go away?
It's nice to know there's a workaround for when account deletion isn't respected, but you could skip the incredulity, you shouldn't have to go through your settings, and your settings shouldn't affect your notifications, if you delete your account.
But the person above just stopped using their account, didn't delete it (or disable it, which is what facebook sends you on the path towards), so that is why the notifications continued. They still had an active account, just hadn't logged in for some time.
Why should @bmelton expect Facebook to respect the notification settings after he has evidence they didn't respect the account deletion request multiple times?
It's not weird nor is it magic to expect Facebook to stop the notifications. That's what pretty much all other web sites and services currently do. They may ping you several times, but eventually they will stop. I know because I run a service that does this, and I pay attention to what other services are doing, and I care about what is socially acceptable. Facebook, unlike other services, ramps up their notification schedule when you get quiet, rather than assuming that no contact and no response after multiple attempts means you don't want to use their service.
What Facebook is doing is what's weird here.
Elsewhere in this thread, @wpietri makes a compelling argument that were Facebook a person in your life, the increasing notifications would be considered very annoying and needy. This is the reason it's weird for a company to do the same thing.
No, it's not. This would be like if my post office stopped delivering my mail because I didn't call them up and tell them to keep delivering my mail.
What is the correct functionality for Facebook given this user's settings?
I do not agree that it should stop sending notifications. Let's say I _want_ to keep getting notifications via email without having to open Facebook every so often. I would have my settings match theirs and I would be quite annoyed if it just stopped working because I didn't log in.
You might be lumping all notifications into the same bucket. There's a difference between a Facebook message that notifies you of someone else IMing or commenting on your photo, and a Facebook message that reminds you to use Facebook or upsell you on services.
That difference has standard terminology in the web business sphere: transactional email vs marketing email. Generally speaking these things have a hard line between them, and are easy to define & separate. Marketing is sales, and transactional is private notifications about your account activity & private notifications from social contacts. Marketing is what other sites stop sending after too much inaction, and marketing is what Facebook is increasing in response to inaction. Transactional notifications don't stop, and they shouldn't stop. I suspect you're misunderstanding me and assuming I'm talking about all email, and not just marketing.
I agree that I misunderstood part of what you were saying. It also sounds like we both agree that the notifications ("transactional email", from the sounds of it) should be going through. I was only ever trying to make a statement about those types of emails. I agree that upping the marketing emails is pretty bad.
I think this line in particular is where I misunderstood:
> It's not weird nor is it magic to expect Facebook to stop the notifications.
In this case, I interpret "notifications" as "transactional emails".
> when the users wish/intent is clear
How is it clear? Their whole post is stating that all they did was not use the site for a bit.
Given that they have an active account and notification are set to notify, why would they ever assume you no longer want notifications? They could very well want all of those notifications (since they have them turned off), so not sending them would actually be the exact opposite of what it should do.
This would be like if my post office stopped delivering my mail because I didn't call them up and tell them to keep delivering my mail.
However, if that isn't the basis of their expectation, I don't really understand the rest of their post. Especially "knowing full well that I didn't see them" (how?) and proceeding to mark the emails as spam... instead of turning off the notifications...
The latter is why I believe they expected the notifications to stop.
Edit: as far as the notifications getting more frequent, that actually is pretty interesting, but not really relevant to the other points made.
Are you not aware that Facebook is attempting to track emails and links for everyone? The mechanisms are numerous and varied, but putting "tracking pixels" in HTML emails is standard practice. If you ever ran a Mailchimp list, you'd know you get reports on who received your email, who opened and looked at them, who clicked any link in them, etc.
Facebook also track visits to any site on the web with Facebook integration, via cookies, which is a large number of popular sites. They know when you've seen their emails, if you're like "most people" and you use hotmail or gmail and not pine. You have to be pretty privacy & security adept to have a Facebook account and avoid getting tracked. 99% of people who use Facebook are not adept enough (or just don't care enough to fight it), and their emails & visits to Facebook and elsewhere are tracked.
Me, I think it's weird to think: "It's perfectly reasonable that if you once give somebody your email they will bother you until the end of time unless you jump through any arbitrary hoops they set up."
I've done this before, just let myself keep getting emails and hoped they stopped. Then I just clicked all of the unsubscribe links they are legally required to put in every email, and I never got an email again.
You don't have to hope for what you want, you can act upon it.
My point is that it's not how it normally works with humans. If a person did this, it would be creepy and controlling. But when a group of people does it because it might make them money, it's ok to blame the person they're bothering.
I get your perspective and agree that it is, for the moment, the dominant one. I just disagree that it's weird to think otherwise.
I don't think it's any more ideal to have to opt out of communications, I'm merely saying that expecting not to have to opt out is a misjudgement.
I'd rather more closely understand reality than hope it gives me exactly what I want. Facebook does not owe me anything.
Although when bringing up paper mail, we should note there are many different standards. Are we talking the standards of 1792, when the USPS was created? Perhaps we use the 1879 mail classification act? The 1920s, when the Direct Mail Advertising Association was formed? How about around the time of the junk mail controversy of 1953? Or perhaps 1970, when Chief Justice Warren Berger wrote, "Everyman's mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive."
1) Clicking "unsubscribe" confirmed that you received the spam mail, so spammers would activate your email address on their other lists, thereby increasing the amount of spam you received. Otoh, acting like /dev/null increased the chance that spammers culled your address to increase their apparent delivery ratio.
2) Following those links gives the spammer access to your web browser, along with tracking cookies, and chances to exploit any plugin vulnerabilities.
3) Your chances of getting phished are way higher if you follow mail that looks like it's from ICQ than if you just go directly to icq.com and find their unsubscribe settings. (I didn't say I got that advice recently....)
[1] In Germany, there is a specific section of the public code governing ToS ("AGB-Gesetz", part of the BGB). Among other things, it forbids "unexpected" terms, acknowledging that people usually cannot read all the ToS that they have to agree to in practice. Quite a few ToS have been nullified by courts because of that rule.
On Facebook, the unsubscribe link is very fine-grained, and is specific to the exact type of notification the link appeared on. I don't think you can fault anyone for giving up on them if you use one but still get Facebook spam.
In fact, those unsubscribe links are the only fine-grained way to control notifications. You can't only preemptively subscribe to the specific notifications you want. The options you get are all, nothing, or dick around with dozens of unsubscribe links for weeks.
Facebook is all dark UI patterns. It's so bad to the point where I don't think any user can be faulted for not knowing how get it to do what they want.
I just don't buy this. I don't get emails. I didn't have to contact customer support. I didn't have to ask for help. I just clicked the link in the email and turned everything off.
That's false; Facebook demonstrably does not work that way at present. If you're getting Facebook emails, the unsubscribe link is scoped only to the particular type of email notification it appeared on. You'll continue to get all the others until you click unsubscribe on each individually, or go into the settings and disable email notifications totally.
Again, they use dark and overly complicated UX patterns to make difficult for people to unsubscribe totally, and this is almost certainly intentional (but deniable). I think it's totally reasonable for someone just assume Facebook's whole unsubscribe system doesn't work, as it's not really reasonable to expect people to invest the time to learn Facebook's deliberately bad unsubscribe system.
I never asked FB to send me any texts other than for 2fa and this is pushy and unwelcome.
"Facebook activated my dormant account and it won’t let me deactivate it"
That doesn't strike me as particularly unreasonable, rather projection of ill will onto Facebook. They have no way of knowing which person is actually the account owner, actual ID would definitively settle the matter.
The best advice I've ever read for the spouse who is on the receiving end of a divorce request/demand and wishes for reparation is to acquiesce quickly and approach the ordeal as a business transaction. You'll find story after story of anecdotes of that working to allow a couple to repair relations and figure out what was broken. Much better than being very emotional and otherwise reinforcing the reasons for the divorce request in the first place.
I think FB is being wise in taking this approach considering how difficult it is to find the real "delete" as opposed to "pause" button.
That's a lesson I've applied to many areas of business to very good outcomes -- customers wishing to terminate, etc.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know whether by "deleting" your account, facebook removes your account/data completely or do they just mark your account deleted?
Is facebook required to remove your account from all data sources ( dbs, failover sites, recovery sites and even the backup tapes )?
I know certain sites, when you "delete" your account, it just updates a column marking your account "deleted" or "inactive".
But I'm most curious about the backup tapes of logs/data.
This non-committal situation created some anxiety for me, it was a decision that still needed to be made in my mind so wouldn't go away.
Then Bryan Lunduke went through the process on his YouTube channel and he claims his contacts at Facebook were unable to find his data once it was deleted, so that was good enough to push me off the fence and I finally made the decision to delete.
I can never be absolutely certain but there's really not much more I can do besides use European privacy laws to try and force the issue, but that probably won't do much about the NSA backup. ;) But my mind is at rest now, I don't worry about it apart from doing my best to limit tracking online but that's another story.
I've no intention of logging back in to check my notification settings, but when I was using Facebook, I would get a push notification maybe once or twice every couple of days. Now, I get more than a dozen SMS messages a day.
I've built notification systems in the past, and in every instance, respecting the fact that abusing the notification power entrusted to us by our customers was seen as a cardinal sin. Maybe it's the absence of that respect that has catapulted Facebook to where it is, or the presence of it that's held me back in my own endeavors, I don't know, but man, as the recipient of all this spam, it really, really feels unsavory, and further evaporates whatever trust I might have had in the platform.
The keyword in your sentence is customers. The people using Facebook aren't its customers, they're the product and thus open season for all kinds of nefarious things you'd never do to your customers.
I think the “user is idle let’s poke the user” is a supposedly a “nice” user engagement to get users back on the system. I hear your concern.
I think at this point:
* opt out notifications before deactivate your account (go to account settings)
* deactivate and opt-out notification at the time of deactivation
* set facebook email as spam or something (although you’d miss any potential real security notifications.)
Or you can also remove your phone number and change the account’s email address. I own a dozen gmail accounts, one for mailing list, one for billing, one for personal, one for school, one for important tech accounts like digital ocean/aws, one for banks, one for general garabge I don’t care and so on. I also run a YouTube channel with a friend so I also own a separate gmail account to be added as a manager of the channel.
Much neater than labels (amazon emails can fuck me up easily, ugh).
I highly recommend this multi-email account approach. I can ignore 50 emails sitting in other accounts most of the time. All of them have second auth and some accounts have different passwords for additional security. Not hard to manage because the address format is always <A>.<purpose>@gmail.com. Consistency!!
The only major issue I've had, with gsuite at least, is not being able to reply from one of the not-actually-existent addresses on my domain.
If they don't provide the unsubscribe option as a one-click option, mark their emails as spam. It's harsh, but getting flagged for spam when they won't stop spamming you or providing the required one-click opt-out is their problem, not yours.
For instance, how do you easily configure Facebook to ONLY send you emails when you're invited to an event or someone sends you a Facebook message, but NOT when your friends post random stuff?
I still get an endless stream of spam from them.
"Facebook - more AOL than AOL ever was."
[1] whatever that means, wrt them.
Blocking sources of spam is part of being a "good netizen".
[1] I find it exceedingly unlikely that FB mail admins would need to reach me to troubleshoot something, but it is the principle.
I think my friends recognize me thank you very much Facebook, otherwise they're not, you know, my actual friends?
Same for Twitter. I signed up once a long, long time ago, and maybe tweeted once and never logged in again. Occasionally I get E-mails from them about people (bots?) who "follow" me despite my inactivity. It's likely because my twitter handle is pretty short and an actual name, so probably some people get confused and follow the wrong person.
Recently I have been busy with a new job, started meditating and reading my Kindle rather than a backlit screen. I use Facebook maybe 15% compared to a month ago. Life feels a bit better better as a result. Kind of like giving up smoking, or cutting down. It's just mental clutter.
The result was... amusing. Facebook kept emailing me the "Hey, did you see what so and so posted?" emails, knowing full well that I didn't see them. But then, after that, I started getting weekly reminders that "You haven't updated your timeline in a week". Facebook, ever the clingy ex-girlfriend it is, seemed to start amping up the frequency of the emails the more I neglected them, so I started just marking them as spam.
Two blissful days went by in which Facebook wasn't a distraction, but then they shifted from email to SMS which, as an Android/Hangouts user, was even more annoying, since now I have to engage in multiple steps to delete.
They really, really want me to use their service.