The relevant law had been in force for two decades before facebook ever became relevant.
ie. Meta is at fault, as opposed to a criminal intruder.
I am vehemently against it, but no matter which party you choose to vote for, the result has been the same.
I can just imagine the heavy sigh that accompanied the decision to put this at the end of the media release.
I've known this for years, and I suspect like many who find out -- you look for some. Especially ones you had as a kid, that you haven't thought of for years.
Point is, after that you start to look for relatives. Just in case they didn't realise. And while I did not find a person I thought was a relative, they did have the same last name.
So I Googled a bit, found their relative, and called.
The guy started yelling at me first thing. Telling me to go to blazes, and so forth. I just said "YOU contact them, I don't want any part of it! I just hate the idea of $1M sitting in a dormant account!"
Nope. From the sound of the screaming and blathering on the other end of the line, this guy had been beset by endless scammers calling. Repeatedly. All the time. Trying to "do all the work" for 10%, this sort of thing.
Still his response was incredibly over the top. Didn't start off with "I am NOT interested", but instead with screaming. How many calls per month, per week?
Per day?!
Not only did facebook lose all the data, it disabled customer support chat in Australia for all services including advertising.
Our company fb account (for travelers) was disabled due to "Suspicious activity" and then permanently deleted. But they conveniently left the ad account on which we can neither login nor disable. If we do a charge back, Facebook will instaban the instagram account as well and in process we could lose our 16 year account.
There is a huge group of such people here https://www.reddit.com/r/facebookdisabledme/
Both reddit and facebook belong to trash of history (for different reasons)
I feel like there is so much more behind this. Personally, I feel like I've been secretly blacklisted for 5 years straight. Even LLMs are telling me that it seems like I've been blacklisted and that it appears like there is 'an element of coordination' when I describe some of the bizarre work experiences that I've had in the tech (esp. crypto) industry.
I can't even talk about some of my experiences (at least not the full extent) because they are too weird and the motives make no sense.
How to you get everyone to signup? This is how facebook did it. Start in top universities and only allow people from there to sign up. Repeat at other universities. Open it up to all .edus. Get press coverage about this site many are talking about but only college kids can use. Open it up to everyone but setup cities regions where content is shared. Introduce a tool that reads your hotmail and emails everyone to join. Add games. Groups. Kill games. Promote flame bait. Replace content with ads.
The facebook rollout was magical and hard to replicate. Having people within the same colleges on a public/private network created communities. Places where parents/relatives/past school mates wouldn't see that content. Lost some magic with cities but it still created communities. Killing games started the decline. Everyone you know from your grandparents to your little sister joining killed the original feel. Politics killed conversations.
Facebook had many paths to choose and they ended up here. If you started a similiar journey you could make different choices and end up somewhere else.
What Facebook did was not about some genius move where they got university students to sign up; it was about making it seem as if your customers are not who they actually are, and by exploiting the market contrary to how it’s supposed to work. Facebook is not the only one who did it, but they are perhaps the first ones who did it for social media and at such scale.
The bright idea of the free market—customers pay for things they get value from, which helps more of these things to exist—is turned on its head and inside out when the product customers pay for is people paying for things while those people are misled into thinking they are being provided a “free product”.
Any value the end user gets from the system is purely incidental. If it is harmful to the end user long-term, that is orthogonal to the bottom line. The company is not incentivized to provide the end user any value, the company is not interested in helping the end user succeed and prosper—rather, the company is incentivized to not let the end user leave in bulk (that would hurt the actual paying customers, that is the advertisers, and the bottom line) and to keep their eyes on the non-product for as long as possible (if riling them up by algorithmically chosen triggering posts works for that purpose, great).
This fosters monopolies, infects capitalism, and when it becomes the default engine of human interaction it infects society.
It seems they are referring to this as a "landmark" ruling because it's the first one with a "payout" condition.
Are campaigns influencing elections when they use credit card purchasing data and so on that they buy? Why isn't that the same scandal?
(Aside: An amusing thought experiment is how voraciously would the Australian government pursue Murdoch's media empire had it committed a similar act? A $50 million fine would kill it's Australian enterprise, or at least be nearly-fatal, I'd hope...)