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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else find this announcement totally pathetic ?

In what world does anyone care about meta impersonation anymore ? Does anyone make public announcement on meta beside meta employees ?

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> In what world does anyone care about meta impersonation anymore?

My 84 yr old mother does. It really annoys her when someone steals her profile picture, makes an account in her name and starts sending friend requests to her friends. I told her Facebook could fix this easily but they don't want to.

Now I can tell her they want to charge her to fix it.

are they scammers?

Yes. Or, if the target person is famous, it could be used for defamation or harassment.

It's happened to my mother several times. Nearest I can tell, they want to see her non-public posts for advertising purposes and this is why Facebook doesn't fix it. More money for them. It causes her a significant amount of distress, so simply put, Mark Zuckerberg abuses the elderly.

Will this actually solve this? Her account may be verified but that doesn't stop another unverified account from spoofing her.

The announcement mentions "impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you" but I'm skeptical how advanced that's going to be. It can't stop name reuse (because real people have the same name). And preventing someone creating a second account with the same image would be perfectly possible today, with no verification system, so I doubt that's it either.

It’s a chicken and egg problem. You want people to start ignoring unverified accounts and make the social expectation that only verified accounts are good. But people. won’t do so until it’s common.

Once established it’s a great network effect. But networks with effects are hard to start.

It'll never be common at this price. Perhaps in Silicon Valley $12 is the price of a cup of coffee but here in Spain it is 10 times that :P

I don’t know what goes into the verification system but if it requires an ID that would prevent most amateur spoofs.

You are assuming that everyone the spoofer contacts is going to know that grandma is a verified user and so this can't be her. Of course, the vast majority of people would not give it a second thought and so this would have no effect on the spoofing problem.

should you have to pay to not be impersonated? weird business model

Verification won’t even fix it, anyways. People taken in by the scammers aren’t gonna go hunting for a verification badge.

“You are already friends with someone by this name” warnings would be a lot more helpful.

Keeps happening to my family members as well. For all of them their initial response is to tell all their contacts that they have been hacked, their anti-virus has failed and they have changed all their passwords on all sites... I keep telling them they have not been hacked, it is just Meta/Facebook being inexcusable poor at detecting obvious new cloned accounts.

Some just panicked and closed their accounts making the fake one the only one with their name left on FB...

I can't imagine any of them wanting to pay to be verified to avoid this though.

Asking people to pay for services is always a good thing. If Metas only revenue is information peddling, expect the lowest common denominator product.

And anything pushing internet identity forward is also good. With the rise of chatgpt verification of “human” is going to be important.

We may find it pathetic for a different reason - when everyone was so down on Elon taking over Twitter and how he was running it into the ground, and now Meta is saying actually that’s not a bad idea, in fact it’s a great idea and we’re going to do it even to the point of taking a huge blow to our ego

Worse yet, it’s clear they have no ideas or understanding why this was a bad idea at Twitter.

It’s just copying for copying sake.

Was it a bad idea at twitter? Or was Musks handling of the whole situation just crap?

If Musk had made an impassioned case about why, and engaged peoples concerns in a grown-up way it might have gone better.

It certainly was the handling and the strategy how they'd introduce it. First, they obviously should haven't repurposed an existing badge. Im my opinion, setting a lower price in the 1st three months and openly communicating that the price will increase a bit seems like a choice to get quick adoption. 8$/month is too high when people can't experience the value of it yet.

It is both. It was an asinine play obvious to anyone that thought about the trolling for half a second, and the purported benefits were what? Now you too can get a blue checkmark? Sure the verification process was capricious crap, but now he's ransoming back features to people.

Musk is a fool. But Zuck is the fool that follow him.

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