Posted by gardenergirl on April 22, 2010, at 21:21:19
In reply to LYING ABOUT FB + TWTR....why am i not surprised?, posted by fayeroe on April 21, 2010, at 17:56:58
Fayeroe,
I can certainly understand your reaction to seeing that message in your FB inbox. It definitely would feel like an intrusion to me, and perhaps threatening in some way. I'm sorry that Bob acted to block you, as I do think that it would be useful for the community to see this dialog actually played out. One question I have is whether the message you received was a link to a thread, i.e. a hyperlink you could click on, a cut-and-paste of the thread on Babble, or perhaps a screen shot of the thread on Babble, and sadly, you can't clarify that here now. Bah.
At any rate...
I looked at my FB message box today, and I noted that there were not any messages that did not list who they were from, so I'm not sure why yours wouldn't have an associated "sender". That alone would be off-putting. But I did want to let you know that it is possible to send a message to someone on FB even if they are not your Facebook "friend". I recently did that in order to get in touch with a FB friend's husband to ask how my friend was. My friend was not able to get on FB herself at that time. My message went through to her husband on FB, even though we were not FB friends, and he was able to reply to me on FB, even though he is not on my friend list.
It appears that one can set their privacy for receiving messages to the following choices: "Everyone", "Friends of friends", or "Only Friends". So if your profile was set to "Everyone", as mine is currently, then anyone could have sent that to you. I suspect that the setting "Everyone" is the default, as I don't recall specifically choosing that for myself.
It's possible, then, that someone who had knowledge of your email address could search for that email address on FB and find your facebook profile. The only way I'm aware of that someone could be prevented from finding a person's profile on FB would be if that profile was set to be non-searchable. Again, I suspect that being searchable is the default for privacy on FB. Folks can also have FB search for friends automatically through their email contacts list if they allow their contact list to be linked to FB. So anyone who has the email you used for FB in their list of email contacts could potentially find your former profile on FB if you didn't elect to become non-searchable.
Gah, just writing all this out shows just how confusing it is.
If you ever decide to reactivate FB, I do recommend taking a few minutes to go to Account->Privacy settings-> etc. and go through all the options to make sure that the settings are what you're comfortable with.
At any rate, I'm sorry this happened to you. I can certainly understand your upset at Bob/Babble about it, but I wanted to point out that it really could have been anyone who sent it. Of course it must have been someone who was aware of your connection to Babble, or why would they send it? And having one's real world persona connected to Babble can certainly feel unsafe.
Hope you're well otherwise. There have been times when I've read something or heard something in the news that made me wonder what your reaction would be. Usually something political. :)
gg
poster:gardenergirl
thread:944420
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20100321/msgs/944619.html