I’m promoting a new game that my company FatHat Games is putting out called BabySavers. Of course we are a small company so we have to leverage every social media network we can. This includes of course, the largest, Facebook. I had previously removed my account from Facebook due to their privacy issues and my general distrust. Unfortunately needing to do business I had to re-open my account. While I’ve observed many nuisances during this process like imported blog notes not formatting properly and a crap ton of e-mails being automatically generated for me there hasn’t been any real show stoppers. Until this morning.

Facebook does what it can to prevent bots and one way it does that is through the captcha every where! This verification happens till you “verify” your account. In order to do that you have to provide your phone number so they can text you a verification number. This is where the problem lies. Due to my afore mentioned privacy issues I’ve chosen not to provide my cell number as part of my profile. And yet now Facebook wants to know what my cell phone number is. I wish I had taken a screen shot ahead of time but there is no indication, no text, no warning indicating that this information is not maintained. I don’t want Facebook to have that information at all. Do they keep your number when you “verify”?

Obviously there are more privacy issues with Facebook and I shutter at the thought of how many people throw their information at the service willy nilly. Lets hope Facebook gets their house in order some time soon. I fear the worse though. That it’s going to take an apocalyptic style data breach to wake every one up. Here’s to hoping for the best!