Thoughts From a Clicker
By Tiny Ruisch
I’d like to take a minute to give Facebook a big thank you for giving me a subject for an article for this newsletter. I often have a problem deciding what to write about. Facebook made this one a “no‑brainer”.
With less than 50 friends, I’m not a big user of the service. I usually log on only once day for about 15-20 minutes. I don’t have any of the mobile apps installed, have never hit a “like” button and seldom post anything. The only reason I haven’t closed my account is I have many relatives that keep me informed of what is happening.
People that know are aware that I don’t answer my phone for any calls that are not in my contact list. If I don’t answer for them, I can’t really come to the phone. Facebook caused me to do some research on calls that have been rejected. From January 1 through April 5, there were exactly 7 of them. Things changed for a couple of weeks:
| April Date | Rejected Calls |
| 06 | 32 |
| 07 | 18 |
| 08 | 46 |
| 09 | 42 |
| 10 | 6 |
| 11 | 0 |
| 12 | 22 |
| 13 | 8 |
| 14 | 14 |
| 15 | 12 |
| 16 | 14 |
| 17 | 4 |
| 18 | 2 |
After a two week onslaught of unwanted calls, they have finally started to taper off to around 2-5 per day. It wasn’t hard to figure out what happened. In early April, more than half a billion phone numbers from Facebook accounts were posted on hacker forums. Of course, the company went into “Public Relations” mode and announced that they believed the data was “scraped” from accounts in 2019. We were assured that everything has been fixed. Funny thing is, I don’t remember knowing that two years ago.
If you’ve had an increase in spam calls and have a Facebook account, you might now know why. Once again, thanks Facebook. You’ve helped me prove what I’ve said for years. I don’t much care who has my phone number. I don’t pay much attention to it anyway. Facebook has also given credo to the fact that the “National Do Not Call Registry” doesn’t work well.
Thanks for reading and keep on clicking.