A hacked Facebook profile, and "twelve years of life erased". Images, videos, memories and about 3,700 contacts suddenly disappeared: this is what can happen in the era of social media, as told in the testimony that we publish below. With an important reflection: is it right to entrust such an important part of one's life to social networks?
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What we do defines our path, our history, helping to define who we are. Given that what we are pertains to our self which is something immaterial, it is not essential to keep a material trace of the things we have done, also because the things we do are not always material. But sometimes the material traces help keep the memory of what we have done , even within ourselves, because the mind sometimes forgets things. This is the priceless value of a photo or an object that reminds us of a particular moment we have experienced .
A few days ago Facebook canceled my account, and with it about twelve years of my life . Images, writings, videos, memories (in the sense that FB refers to memories), around 3,700 contacts, including those of a personal nature and those with a professional interest. Within half an hour I lost everything.
It makes little sense to say that Facebook is not life but its hagiographic and phony representation : as the philosopher Luciano Floridi observed, the distinction between real life and online life is no longer as clear-cut as it was at the beginning of the Internet era, so much so that he coined the term onlife to define our current existences characterized by an incessant interaction of the two dimensions. Losing Facebook means losing a piece of yourself; net of the economic loss, no less than losing the house and everything in it following a fire or an earthquake.
Someone hacked into my account fraudulently and Facebook suspended it , asking me to prove it was really mine. First he asked to send me a text message with a confirmation code, then he wanted a photo of me and finally an identity document. After making sure that it was really Facebook asking me these things and not the hacker himself (an identity document is not sent to anyone), I did what was asked. Facebook replied that it would check and in the favorable case it would reactivate the account otherwise it would delete it forever, without appeal. And so unfortunately it was.
It didn't even help to point out the guy who, shortly after I created a new account, asked me for money to reactivate it, claiming to be a web security professional; just as it was useless to look for any contact at Meta to report the incident.
Everything I had uploaded to Facebook in twelve years has been irretrievably lost : the surfing I've done, the books and articles I've published, the prizes I've won, the interviews I've had, my travel photos, the dishes I've cooked, thoughts I've expressed, books I've read and commented on, what I've experienced together with other people: suddenly I no longer have a past to leaf through when I feel like it .
It's not just a sentimental fact, because the past somehow defines us. When you come into contact with someone for the first time (and even business contacts go virtual), our life told on social media represents a sort of business card , it says who we are, gives us credibility, defines our reputation. All of this was stolen from me.
But that's not all: when an account is deleted , everything written on the groups and pages also disappears; comments made on other people's accounts disappear ; tags made by others disappear everywhere : they disappear precisely in the sense that they are no longer there, they never existed. And we with them.
The ballast also disappears, it is true, those things and those people who we reluctantly carry with us and who constitute a burden to bear. Relieving ourselves of everything that we struggle to let go of is certainly an incentive to take new paths but, as the saying goes, you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The real obscure point of this affair, however, lies in the fact that the truthfulness of what happened to me was assessed by a private entity . Certainly the lengthy contract that is signed at the time of registration mentions the possibility that Facebook can cancel an account for any reason, but the legal legitimacy of what from a legal point of view is a simple agreement between two subjects does not eliminate ethical doubts ( and not only) on the conferral on a private individual of such a great power over our life , as that of saying whether we are or are not. And without the public institutions that represent us being able to plead anything. Put simply, we have privatized our self: it's not beautiful at all .
Luciano Carta
