“You would think that it would be in their interest to improve their security practices,” said Christine Bannan, a consumer protection counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. It means that there’s little incentive for Facebook to do better when it comes to providing support after hacks or stopping account compromises in the first place. Aside from advertisers who are actually paying Facebook, most users are the product - Facebook wants their data to use for ad targeting. Here’s the thing about Facebook’s customer service: their users aren’t actually customers. Instead, users often have to deal with FAQs, chatbots, and forums – not real, human Facebook reps who can deal with a unique problem brought on by a hack. The Facebook Help Center gives you no obvious way to directly contact Facebook support. But if you’re one of the billions of users without those kinds of connections, you’re often stuck dealing with automated systems, she said.
“If you know somebody at the company or you know someone like me, who has access to people at the company, it can be fairly easy,” she added. York told Digital Trends that the best way to get help at Facebook is to either be famous and have an agent who can handle requests for you, or to know someone who works at the company. “Generally speaking, is not very good,” said Jillian York, Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties advocacy group.Ĭontacting an actual human being to help you is so difficult that scammers have created fake Facebook help lines to steal data or money from frustrated users. Or they might not be able to reach a human being at all.Ī recent $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) brought along with it a slew of new privacy rules for the company, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would require the work of “hundreds of engineers.” But when it comes to customer service staff – representatives needed to deal with users who are confused or need help in the aftermath of an account hack – Facebook is lacking, according to consumer advocates and users who have dealt with hacks firsthand. The social network uses automated systems to detect suspicious activity and reset people’s passwords, but anything beyond that forces users to wind their way through an unhelpful labyrinth of customer support reps with limited administrative access. “Facebook support said they couldn’t delete them either, which seemed like a flagrant lie.”įacebook’s billions of users have little recourse when their accounts are hacked or otherwise compromised.
FACEBOOK SUPPORT CHAT FULL
“I couldn’t delete the credit cards or the accounts,” said Linda, an attorney who asked Digital Trends not to use her full name because she was the victim of a crime. She contacted Facebook, and after weeks of back-and-forth, realized just how little their support team could do to help get rid of the ad accounts. She stopped the ads from running, but still had access to what she assumed to be stolen credit cards that the hackers used to pay for the ads. Someone had used her account to create a fake business at a non-existent address, then run Chinese-language ads for watches. When Linda’s Facebook account was hacked, she knew exactly what to do: she quickly reset her password, then logged in to assess the damage.
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