This is reason #2394801928 why I hate Facebook: They spam me, then they rub salt in the wound by making it extremely unpleasant for me to stop receiving the spam. They do allow me to stop receiving the spam, but at the cost of alienating myself from my Facebook-using friends. The details:
I am not on Facebook. I joined in the fall of 2007 and quit on May 5, 2010. (I’ll spare you the “Facebook is evil, kill your account now” rant.) I even went through the complete permanent account deletion process. I have *no account* on Facebook. (If you can trust Facebook to actually follow through, which is a rather big if.)
So, I’m not on Facebook, but pretty much everyone I know is. And these people schedule events on Facebook. Some of them even want to include me. Now, Facebook conveniently allows you invite people not on Facebook to a Facebook event. This is actually handy. It allows people on Facebook to include me on their Facebook event invites without having to send me a separate invitation. But, like most everything else, Facebook abuses this feature. Facebook considers adding the email of a non-Facebook user to a Facebook event as an invitation from the event organizer to the non-Facebook user to join Facebook.
[Now, I never used this feature. Perhaps Facebook tells you that by adding an email address you are inviting the person to join Facebook. They probably do. But, do they tell you all the ramifications of this action? I bet not.]
An invitation doesn’t seem that bad. However, this is where Facebook decides not to play nice. If you (God forbid! What are you thinking??) decide NOT to join Facebook after receiving an invitation, then Facebook sends you periodic reminders via email that someone has invited you to join. (Surely you must have just forgotten to join 9 month ago!) Note that this is an opt-out feature, not opt-in. I get reminder emails because someone else provided Facebook my email address. An unrequested solicitation to join your website is spam in my book. (Though it is legal). So with that event invitation, my friends are really signing me up for Facebook spam. Lovely.
It gets even better… If there is a conversation about this event, Facebook helpfully sends you (the non-Facebook member) all the comments via email. Again, this *is* actually a helpful feature. But! Again! Facebook abuses this. Facebook treats these comments as an invitation to join Facebook from the person who posted the comment. Now you get periodic email reminders from Facebook that friends of friends have “invited” you to join. People I don’t even know. People I’m pretty sure never intended to invite me to Facebook.
Now, Facebook allows you to opt-out of this nonsense. There’s a helpful “If you don’t want to receive these emails from Facebook in the future or have your email address used for friend suggestions, you can unsubscribe.” message in the fine print at the bottom of the email. (Thus making the spam legal. There’s also a “Learn more about this email” link. Clicking on it (http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17151) lands you on a page with a “There was a problem reaching the FAQ you requested.” message. Nice.) But note that “or” clause. That’s the source of this particular grievance with Facebook. You can opt-out of getting these invitation spam emails only at the cost not being able to ever receive event invitations or friend invitations from anyone, ever again (see details below).
Now, I will not be re-joining Facebook, BUT I do want to know if someone wants to connect with me or if someone is inviting me to an event or is tagging me in a photo. By linking the “don’t send me invitation reminders” with “don’t send me any email through Facebook at all”, I have to choose between complete Facebook silence and getting reminder spam.
While complete Facebook silence is appealing, I’m not willing to cut myself off from well-meaning friends, so…I’m stuck with the spam. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg.
Fun side note: One of the reminders I get is “from” someone who I’m pretty sure would be happy never to see me again. Now I find this amusing (though the first time this happened I thought it was puzzling until I read the email), but in other circumstances I might not want to be randomly reminded of certain people. The only way to not get these random trips down not-so-happy memory lane is to cut off communication from all people through Facebook. The all-or-nothing option here could be more than just an annoyance.
tl;dr: Facebook sucks.
For reference, here is the text you have to agree to in order to unsubscribe from the spam invitation emails:
Receiving Emails From People Through Facebook
From time to time, people may send emails to you through Facebook. Examples include when they invite you to an event, tag you in a photo or add you as a friend. If you continue, you’ll no longer receive any of these emails. Also, Facebook will no longer use your email address to generate friend suggestions for you and others. We’ll still keep a secure record of your email address so we can make sure you don’t receive these emails.
Ban Facebook graphic credit: David Harthcock via Gizmodo.
