Facebook
1601 S. California Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94304.

August 13, 2010

Re: Certified Letter Shut out of Facebook Account (see attached Page Two)

Dear Administrator,

I am quite familiar with the places from where I choose to access my accounts (such as Facebook). Your test, which asks me to verify myself, is a set-up for failure. (See Page Two). I have been shown pictures from you that have a circle around dogs, around gates. Yet, you ask me to give these items a human name. In addition, the humans you do ask me to verify are friends of my fb Friends, and there is, of course, no possible way that I know who these people are.

In addition, I find it personally offensive you would use random individuals as a method of account ID verification. I truly hope you are not showing pictures of me and my friends to random individuals who do not know me personally.

At this point, I have been locked out of my Facebook account for three weeks. Now, I want to delete my account, which I also cannot do, due to this ridiculous and very prejudicial verification system you have implemented recently.

I demand that you either restore me access to my Facebook account, or that you delete it and all its contents today, and notify me of what you have done immediately in writing to my address listed above. My lawyer is copied this letter. I refuse to have my name and my information on a site that I cannot access; to be clear, I mean your site, Facebook. In addition, I refuse to have my image displayed to unknown people as a cheap and convenient verification process for your corporation, so you must take down my site and all its contents completely and never use any words or images from my site for your purposes now or at any time in the future.

In my opinion, you have stolen my property. Be assured, I will sue you if I do not hear form you within ten days, and my account – and everything in it – is either restored to me to access easily, or it and its contents are completely deleted by you.

Best regards,
Deborah Sundahl
369 Montezuma Ave #112
Santa Fe, NM 87501

Cc: Benjamin W. Allison, Sutin, Thayer & Browne, Santa Fe, NM 87501

The sad thing is that so much of our culture (communication, expression etc) is held hostage by very large public companies who are obliged to maximise profit for shareholders. If that means pandering to people and groups who are terrified of even the discussion of pornography, then there is little hope that these sorts of conversations can take place as part of mainstream culture (like Facebook).

It is highly ironic to me saying this, given the recent discussion around your blog post about capitalism http://www.msnaughty.com/blog/2010/06/12/why-yes-i-am-a-capitalist/

But I think that it serves to highlight the difference between “people” and “corporations” and how they do business.

John.