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Ask HN: How do I stop this Facebook stalker?

14 points by cyberlurker ↗ HN
Unfortunately, a close acquaintance of mine is being stalked on Facebook by a troubled person they were once friends with. We suspect they are utilizing this method of temporary deactivations: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna46808719

Basically they can't block them or even see if they are friends with them unless they happen to be online long enough to search.

The easy answer is to not use Facebook but unfortunately Facebook is desired for posting and sharing photos with international family members and friends.

What is the next best way to solve this problem? Can we get in contact with someone at Facebook somehow to get a setting that simply unfriends people that deactivate their accounts repeatedly?

18 comments

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bckr
Perhaps you can create an automation to scan their friends list continuously and alert the user when this person is online so that they can manually unfriend them.
cyberlurker
Oooh, maybe.
bckr
feel free to reach out if you want to brainstorm this
sha256sum
> The easy answer is to not use Facebook but unfortunately Facebook is desired for posting and sharing photos with international family members and friends.

Well then your friend will continue to run this risk and it sounds like they understand that.

twobitshifter
There may be a way for facebook to do it. If not your friend could relaunch a second facebook with only their friends as of today.
kleer001
> How do I stop this Facebook stalker?

> unfortunately Facebook is desired for posting and sharing photos

A = B & A != B

No solution. You'd need an |

atoav
This is rather

  A = B & A ≠ C
You assume the stalker stalking is the same as someone sharing their data online. And while they are related, they are not the same, which means the stalker can be targeted by seperate means (as discussed in this thread).

I'd generally advice against abusing formal logic in such a way for real world problems that involve social, legal and technical solutions as this might trick you into ignoring what is there.

kleer001
> You assume the stalker stalking is the same as someone sharing their data online.

I'm just going on OP's logic.

"I don't want something to happen in a place I want to keep going to."

Well, stop going there.

Personally I like Robert Pattinson's solution to a stalker, purported solution...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/robert-pattinso...

Probably false, and probably not applicable.

atoav
If you don't wanna get hit by a care while crossing a street not crossing any street is certainly a solution.

But you could A) still be hit by a car on the sidewalk and B) maybe other solutions like looking before crossing, only taking pedestrian crossings etc. mitigate the problem in a much better way that lets you live your life in a much more free manner.

Group_B
Download their entire facebook profile. Then delete that account and create a new one. Add back all their friends.
Nextgrid
Not deleting the old account is a better idea. Let the stalker stalk the inactive account, that way unless they notice they will have no reason to search for a new account.
Group_B
Yeah that’s a better idea actually
gs17
I haven't posted to Facebook in a long time, but years ago I only shared my posts with a specific list which had the friends I really wanted to see things. If the issue is the stalker seeing/interacting with posts, making a similar list for the rest of their friends list (which may unfortunately take some time if there's hundreds of them) could at least give them no new content to stalk.
rendall
I deleted my account years ago, so I'm not sure if this still applies. I created a private group and added everyone I cared about, and then treated it like my profile timeline. I never posted to my actual profile timeline.
cookiengineer
Well, technically you could write a chrome extension and leave the extension and computer running over night...and automate the clicks to block the user once it appears again.

I did something like this in the past but facebook updated their design so my extension meanwhile is useless. A former friend of mine's account got compromised and was spamming me (via email) every time their account was online. This was the only way to get rid of it.

speedgoose
You could configure your content to only be visible for an allowed list of friends and not all of them. This feature was developed by Facebook to compete with Google+.
hackily
I believe blocking a user via Facebook messenger presents an option to defriend the user as well.