Lert.info emails

[harm_less]

 No idea what Facebook has to say on the matter as we avoid FB due to the security risks it presents for an online trader like us. Seems Lert's situation would perhaps confirm my concerns in that respect.

A lot of businesses do rely on social media for advertising.  Could you expand on the "security risks it presents for an online trader" as it affects yourselves?

Genuinely interested, I had a client recently whose business relied on instagram for several years, built up quite a following, invested a chunk of change on professional photography etc, and a few months back the insta account was compromised and they missed the security email from instagram to say the email address had been changed. Now they have no access to it at all.  

Enable 2FA folks... 

A friend who has a working life of involvement with large scale petro-chem project management was told years ago by an IT tech colleague that "if you on FB it will enable me to be inside your computer within an hour". Since that time FB has embedded itself into so many online activities and website accesses I suspect the situation has not improved, and is probably far more invasive. The amount of control that FB attempts to take over your online activities scares me basically and my trust levels in regard to their business model are very low.

Having suffered a DDoS attack on our website last year and so experienced being 'hacked' and the remedial action we were forced to undertake I'm not interested in potentially opening doors to another such invasion. We have a number of trade customers who derive substantial sales volumes from their FB and IG profiles, and then purchase from us their base materials for manufacturing. Benefitting from others' FB presence without our actually doing so ourselves is a win-win IMO.

Likewise I prefer self ownership of digital content such as website selling platforms and music content. As your IG experience proves, accessing online content via a SaaS provider puts you in a very vulnerable position if that provider misbehaves or suffers damage to their system. That's why we own our website design in full (rather than using Shopify) and I have in excess of 1,000 CDs ripped to HD (and rarely use Spotify). Similarly I can't imagine relinquishing ownership of our private car in favour of adopting a TaaS (Transport as a Service) lifestyle in the foreseeable future, especially in light of our rural location, but economic logic may well require a rethink of this position in the coming years. Time will tell.