I was having login problems with Facebook, again. I found myself in a situation where to log in to Facebook I needed to verify that who I said I was by confirming it on another device that I was already logged into. Problem was the password had been reset and forgotten or not properly recorded, and there were other devices that were signed in. To Recover the Facebook account they were a selfie. Which of course I refused because I wasn’t the owner of the account I was trying to recover. And something about it just felt off.
Now more than a month later, after the discord ID debacle and backlash, California passing the law requiring Age verification to be able to install an operating system. And the growing number of states that were considering dystopian rules all in the name of protecting children, Turns out it was meta lobbying for these age verification laws and pushing for real ID for the verification.
Turns out that since Facebook’s model is selling data it gathers on its users. And lackadaisical about removing bots on its platforms Facebook is having a hard time telling the difference between an actual human being and a reducing the value of the data that it’s collected making it harder to sell that data. So rather than take on the expense and task of identifying and removing bots from their platform They decided it was cheaper to spend $2 billion lobbying various state governments to age technology. So Facebook can better identify who on their platform is a bot and who is an actual human being.