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.
