My mom lost her Facebook and a decade of her digital life is gone

Date:
Wed, 04 Aug 2021 16:00:50 +0000

Description:
My moms Facebook got hacked and shes lost the last decade of her digital
life. What can she do? What can any of us do?

FULL STORY ======================================================================

In the middle of June, someone stole my moms Facebook account. She asked me for help, and with so many other fires to put out gadgets to review,
articles to write, dinner to make, pets to take care of, a bachelor party to plan it fell by the wayside. But now that Facebook has radically limited its account recovery process, theres no way to get it back. A decade of my moms digital life is gone.

Like a bit under three billion people around the world, my mom has stored
some of her life on Facebook mostly in photos of vacations and milestones, but also in the web of people shes kept up with over the years on the most popular social network on the planet. Its her only link with many of these folks, and in an ordinary year, losing these connections would be
devastating.

But its been far from an ordinary year: like others in their 60s, my mom has kept at home, and Facebook has been her only lifeline to the outside world. The pandemic has ripped away our social lives, and weve turned to online alternatives but for many older individuals, Facebook is the only place to go. And as things tenuously start to open up, her network of associations and groups is all on Facebook, planning without her.

She didnt have 2-factor authorization on her account she struggles to remember her passwords as it is. She could have clicked the email alert notifying her that her Facebook accounts password had changed but she didnt, figuring it was a phishing scam. Weve been trained to watch out for
unofficial messages so well that we can barely tell when its the real thing.

And thanks to the way Facebook has set up password recovery, with no customer service contact to reach out to no human being to reason with, no authority to make our case all those memories and networks are gone. (Image credit: Future) Facebook: account recovery if youre still in the account

If you search Facebook account recovery on Google, youll find half a dozen methods, because Facebook has changed their process so many times over the years. It makes sense as the social network got bigger and instituted more complex security methods, scammers got more sophisticated in their ways to steal accounts.

Thats why youll see online (and perhaps remember) some methods to recover
your account, like having your friends report it was hacked. Some recourse, some method. But now, if someone else got into your account and changed the password and recovery email, youre done. The account is gone. Because, for
all that Facebook calls it a Help Center, it only offers one route to reset the password: send it to the email address on file.

Yknow, the one changed to the hackers email address.

There was a brief window to contest the password change: if wed clicked on
the possibly-phishing email, theres a now-expired link to tell Facebook that this was a hack. But theres nobody to make our case to, now. The hacker has the last decade of my moms digital life. And access to all the accounts she signed up with using Facebook yknow, like Facebook encourages. (Image
credit: Future) Two-factor your parents digital lives. Now.

Former baseball pitcher Vernon Law might have said it best: Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards. While the lesson here is obviously to add 2-factor authentication to everything,
its also that you need to do this for your parents and grandparents, too.
Weve entered an age where their digital lives not just financial but social need to be safeguarded.

Most of them probably wont make the jump to the next Facebook, if there is one. Their friends are on one social network, and so is their digital
history. Theyve settled in. Theyre (digitally) home.

Like any human being on the planet, they wont want to go through even more hassle to get into their accounts. Tough. Download a free Authenticator
mobile app (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, or Authy) and load Facebook into it or set up a security key . Make them open their phone to authenticate every time they want to idly scroll their timeline and comment
on posts. Have them change their password at the first whiff of strange activity.

Because if you dont, and a hacker locks them out, you wont have much recourse beyond tweeting desperately at any Facebook-related account. Or writing a
blog pleading for Facebook to listen.

So thats it, Facebook Im begging you to reach out to me on Twitter or over email [david(dot)lumb@futurenet.com] to get my moms Facebook back. I promise Ill turn 2-factor authorization on the second shes in. Stay on top of tech news with the TechRadar newsletter



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/my-mom-lost-her-facebook-and-a-decade-of-her-di gital-life-is-gone/


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