Some of you using Facebook might have noticed that the social media has recently asked you to upload a photo of your government ID to prove that you’re really the user. This just started today and as far as we know this is the first time that we’ve ever even heard of this. But apparently after a quick search on Twitter we see that people have been affected by this since early September 2016.
Two separate people in our office have just been hit with this within the past fifteen minutes. The first prompt takes you to a page that reads like this:
Rather than upload a photo of an extremely important document to the internet, we decided to click continue. After that, we were taken to this page, asking us to enter one of the following alternatives.
Again, we chose the “I don’t have any of these IDs” because we weren’t about to share that information with Facebook. Here’s where we were taken.
What Happens If I Don’t Upload My ID?
If you don’t upload a photo of your ID, then you’ll be removed from Facebook, for real. You’ll be logged out of Facebook permanently until you upload your ID, which is some serious amount of bullsh*t if you ask us.
Here’s an email that we were sent by Facebook after some of our clicks showed our anger at the social media site:
Hi,
We’ve asked you to verify your identify because it looks like you may have multiple accounts or may not be using your authentic identity.
If you’ve already tried to log in to Facebook and followed the instructions, but weren’t able to verify your identity, please reply to this email and attach an image of your government-issued photo ID to the message. You can use a scanner or take a photo of your ID.
If you don’t have a government-issued photo ID, you can also send us 2 different forms of ID (ex: school ID, credit card) that both show the same name. One of the IDs must also include a photo or date of birth that matches the information on your Facebook profile.
If you don’t have an ID that shows the name you use in real life and your photo or date of birth, you can provide 2 forms of ID that show the same name and a government ID that includes a date of birth or photo that matches the information on your profile.
Eventually, after we learned that we’d be blocked from Facebook forever unless we uploaded a photo of our government ID, we broke a sent a picture of our driver’s license. So when you learn in two years that Facebook was hacked by some Russians, you’ll see our information somewhere in the wiki. FML.
