Facebook is terrifyingly bad with privacy
I'm just a regular ol' end user. I'm not some cyber security guru who actually understands how any of this shit works, but I use a password manager and 2FA whenever possible at least.
About a year ago, I permanently deleted my Facebook account. Mostly because I hate how enshittified it has become over the years, but also because Mark Zuckerberg is a fucking tool. Also because I rarely ever used it, so it's just sitting online with a timeline of my life dating back to high school, and I wanted it off of Zuck's servers.
That's not even what this is about though; my account is still deleted and it has nothing to do with me personally.
Quick backstory: a friend from high school unexpectedly passed away very recently and I realized I have no way to get ahold of any of our mutual friends. I was a little shaken up and I couldn't remember for sure if I had actually deleted my account or just deactivated it, so I headed over to Facebook to figure it out.
The login form was just showing as a single field to input my phone number, so I figured what the heck; I'll punch it in and see if it reactivates my account.
Much to my surprise, it sent me a login code and prompted me to update my password for security reasons. So I did. Then I was taken to my newsfeed, but it wasn't actually my news feed. It was some lady who had my phone number 10+ years ago.
I thought about posting screenshots but I didn't wanna post this lady's personal social media feed for the whole world to see, obviously.
The worst part? There's no conceivable way for me to actually report this to anyone. It tells me to go to facebook.com/login/identify to correct it, but all it does is log me back into her account. I went to the help page and it's fucking AI.
Just to be clear, I'm pretty sure this person definitely wasn't using my iPhone Air 10+ years ago to log into her account.
I keep digging through their support pages but I keep going in circles; I can't find a way to actually contact anyone if I don't have an account. If I actually knew this person I'd get ahold of her and let her know she needs to update some stuff on her account, but again; it's just some random person who used to have my phone number.
So I guess I just give up. This doesn't help me getting ahold of a couple old friends I really wanted to reconnect with, but I'm glad I left that cesspool last year.