06 September 2013

Facebook silliness

About a week ago I deactivated my Facebook account. I went through the whole process of disabling all of the hapless shit Facebook does to keep me tied in (the periodic emails, the notification emails in case my friends say stuff I might care about, etc…) and entered the confirmation code, and that was that.

screenshot

How often do I see the Facebook login screen? Not very.

Anyway, I went on my merry way for a few days until suddenly I started getting some notifications in my Notification Center. Stuff like “did ali deactivate his facebook? his name is black and I can’t click on it” and all that. But I was only getting notifications about the group chat I was in when I deactivated my account (obviously people weren’t writing on my wall or messaging me directly, since my account doesn’t outwardly exist anymore).

Well, as it turns out, Notification Center still has some remnant access to things in Facebook to which only I should have access. Except since I shouldn’t really exist according to Facebook’s privacy logic, this makes no sense.

I’m not sure if the issue is some old token/credential giving any arbitrary holder (fortunately in this case the original holder) access to a person’s conversations even after deactivating his/her account

or

if this is just Facebook keeping my name/identity in the chat list (which makes sense) but somehow failing to disconnect the notification bit that would naturally disconnect when your account is deactivated. If that’s the case, there’s still the matter of why my Notification Center was able to access them (let alone why it was pushed those messages).

I’ve asked a friend to try sending another message to the group chat, hopefully with something pithy like “I think Ali’s eavesdropping on us”. I’ll update if I catch a notification in-progress.

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