This is just an update to let you know that I’m leaving FaceBook. Lock, stock, and barrel. It was never that great as a promotional platform for my writing and publishing. But, recent incidents made it untenable for any reason.
What happened? Well, here’s the story.
The other day, I was making my usual check of financial transactions and came across a few that I knew we did not make with our credit card. I do keep track of current information security issues and follow Brian Krebs. Earlier this month, I read the article linked there when Brian posted it. Then, when I saw these unusual financial transactions on my credit card account, I started doing a little checking. The only place that particular credit card information, also associated with my name, address, and other credentials, could have been found was FaceBook (FB).
My accounts on FB include my personal account and my author page. The author page is a business account, and the credit card was included there to pay for promotions. I also used that for making donations on FB. I immediately called our financial institution and reported the fraudulent charges and fraudulent use of my credit card. So, I now have new cards on the way, and will have to go through a number of accounts to make sure regular payments don’t get backed up.
After all that, I posted on FB about what happened and linked Brian’s post from his web site. Only one or two people seem to have seen the post because FB seems to have “shadow-banned” my account. I posted another warning about checking credit/debit card accounts for possible fraud activity, with a link to Brian’s post. Both those posts have been “shadowed.” By this I mean they do not appear in my regular news feed, but only on my personal page. They did not get tagged by FB by their fact checkers or anything.
So, I started to go through my author page business settings and removed my credit card from the promotions area. I also started to remove my PayPal account, but ran into a problem. That took until this morning to finally complete. Rather than try to maintain the author page, I just decided to remove it altogether. So, it’s gone.
I also posted that my account on FB will be deleted in the next day or so. Of course, I’m downloading all the data first.
In the meantime, I’m exploring other social media options. Not long ago, I took my book trailers off of YouTube and put them up on Rumble. Surprise, surprise! The trailers that sat on YouTube for a few years with just a couple views each, now have many views. Well, it’s in the teens, but still …. And more views appear regularly.
I’m also on MeWe. I’m not sure I’ll stay there, but I do have an author page there, too. At least, MeWe doesn’t censor or otherwise attempt to play information overlords.
Twitter’s days are numbered, too. But that is for another day.
For your own safety, I suggest you go to Brian’s post linked above. Use the “have I been pwned?” link to determine if you or your data have been exposed in that FB breach. If so, check your credit/debit cards for unauthorized transactions. Do this on a daily basis.
Stay safe and keep writing!
(Note: My author page seems to still be on Facebook, even after I supposedly deleted it.)