Facebook has locked-down my account, claiming suspicious activity, and demanding that I send an image of identification (such as a driver license) in order to regain access.

The claim of suspicious activity may be genuine. Some days ago, my account was one of various to which an outside party got access. Some of the victims were using two-factor authentication, and I'd done nothing that would give others access to my password, so we may be sure that Facebook itself was cracked, again. Those who broke into our accounts did not move to take control away from us, and acted in a manner that would alert us to the cracking, so the effort seems to have been a demonstration of an ability to crack into the system. (When this 'blog was hosted by Midphase, the server itself was cracked, but the crackers did no worse to the users than to leave a non-executable file in our directories. By the way, Midphase sought to gaslight me when I discovered the cracking, claiming that every damn'd victim had been individually at fault.)

I simply won't provide Meta (qua Facebook or qua Instagram or otherwise) with an image of any identification document. Such an image would present data to them that I do not want them to possess. They have been both fools and knaves, about personal information and in other ways. (I was not using two-factor authentication with Facebook exactly because I didn't want them to possess my phone number or somesuch. Prompted by a suggestion from Ray Scott Percival, some days ago I ordered a YubiKey, which is due to arrive to-morrow. I will be using it for various other accounts, and would have been using it for Facebook.)

A few years ago, I found my account similarly locked-down, but the condition was cleared after several hours, without my providing the demanded information. However, I do not expect such a reversal in this case. So I will probably forfeit my account. I will not create another.

If you have found your way here from Facebook, and want to contact me, you can find an e.mail address at the bottom either of the sidebar (when viewing the desktop version of the site) or of the hamburger menu (when viewing the mobile version of the site). That e.mail address is presented as a graphic (to impede 'bots). The address is an alias of one with the user ID Mc_Kiernan, so if you use a white-list to screen your e.mail then you might want to effect a substitution.

Those of you concerned with privacy may appreciate that no website in any of my domains has ever used Google Analytics. Nor have these websites ever had a reäction button (such as to Like an entry) connected to Facebook or any other such service. (Those reäction buttons allow visitors to be tracked even if the visitors do not click on them.)

On the other hand, the videos embedded in some of my entries use IFRAME elements, and those elements involve sending a request from your browser to the host of the video file, even if a visitor doesn't start the video, so they might be used to track him or her. All these videos were once hosted on YouTube, most but not all have since been moved to BitChute. I may move every video to BitChute, to reduce potential tracking of my visitors.

[Up-Date (2021:01/15): At this point, visitors are simply not tracked by Alphabet while here. All embedded videos are hosted on BitChute. There are links to some videos on YouTube; but, unless a visitor follows these links, Alphabet is unaware of the visit to a page containing the link.]

Assuming that you do much surfing of the WWWeb, you've surely noticed that there are a great many sites that now require one to use an account with an external social-networking service in order to access functionality that previously would have been available without such an account. For example, to comment to some sites which are not themselves hosted on Yahoo! or on Facebook or on Google+, one must none-the-less log into an account with one of these services.

From the perspective of the site-owners, reliance upon such external services can reduce the costs of managing site-access. The external social networks provide this management partly as valued-added to their account-holders, but providing this service is a means of building a behavioral profile of those account-holders.[1] (To this day, most people do not assimilate the fact that most social-networking services exist largely as profiling services.) As you might expect, I feel that efforts to build such profiles should be resisted.

I understand both the problems of the client-sites instead independently managing access, and the difficulties of knowing just where to draw some objective line that would distinguish acceptable and unacceptable external services. (For example, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to require a verified e.mail account, and even to require a verified e.mail account from a service that is not black-listed. But, once one requires a verified e.mail account from a service that is white-listed, one may be pushing visitors into allowing themselves to be profiled (by an e.mail-service provider), if the white-list is overly constrained.)

What seems inexcusable to me is not simply handing access-control over to an external service, but handing it over exclusively to one external service that is a profiling service. The very worse case of such inexcusability is handing control over to the biggest of these services, Facebook, but it remains inexcusable to give exclusivity to any other external service (unless that service has some real guarantee against building profiles).

Which brings me to a policy change that I will be effecting for my own 'blog, not-withstanding that it has never required an external account to access its functionality.

At this and some other sites, a list of implicitly or explicitly recommended links is provided, outside of the body of principal content. (With the present formatting of this 'blog, they are in a right-hand column.)

In the case of my own list, I will be removing (or refraining from providing) links whenever I discover that the only evident way to access those other sites or to comment to them is by using an account with exactly one external social-networking site.

For example, if a 'blog is not hosted on Facebook, but the only readily seen way to comment to it is by using a Facebook account, then I will not wilfully provide a link to it. I will continue to link to Facebook sites; I will continue to link to sites where the only readily seen ways of commenting use social-networking accounts, so long as accounts from more than one social network may be used.

This policy only applies to the sort of generalized recommendations represented by that list. I may continue to link within principal content to such things as news-stories at sites that are enabling such profiling.

[1] I don't know that those handing access-management off to such services receive side-payments for doing so, but it wouldn't surprise me.