I got a friend request on my Facebook page from someone from the U.S. census? WTF! I've made it known on Facebook that I'm a transsexual.  Is the dam government now trying to track us and put us in some database?  This is really creepy.  Has anyone else experienced this.

*mod edit for language

Quote from: Amy1988 on January 04, 2015, 11:52:20 AM
I got a friend request on my Facebook page from someone from the U.S. census? WTF! I've made it known on Facebook that I'm a transsexual.  Is the dam government now trying to track us and put us in some database?  This is really creepy.  Has anyone else experienced this.

I pretty much toss any friend request from anyone I do not know either directly or by association. Something as bogus sounding as US Census Bureau??? Give me a break. Just some Nigerian Phishing expedition.

I would report the account to Facebook. I have no doubt that it is fake. If someone they had an account, it would be just like others that you like and not friend. Secondly it would have a symbol next to it proving it to be an authentic genuine account of theres.
Mariah

Quote from: Amy1988 on January 04, 2015, 11:52:20 AM
I got a friend request on my Facebook page from someone from the U.S. census? WTF! I've made it known on Facebook that I'm a transsexual.  Is the dam government now trying to track us and put us in some database?  This is really creepy.  Has anyone else experienced this.

  Just a reminder to keep the language clean here.

Quote from: Jill F on January 04, 2015, 02:31:05 PM
Just a reminder to keep the language clean here.

Sorry for the language.  The person who sent the request was Nancy Williams and was friends with one of my friends.  I deleted it. 

So a friend of your friend, who just happens to work for the US Census Bureau, made a friend request?
Facebook is always making suggestions on people you might want to friend.

Sounds like phishing to me!

Report the account (IIRC there's a little button in the corner that lets you do this, and you can specify what sort of abuse it is). If it is a real person and weird coincidence, it's not going to hurt them to get a couple erroneous reports.

If the govt wants to know about you, they will know. Both the USG and GB (and likely others, as well) work together on internal and international intelligence gathering.

And they don't need accounts to do it (unless they want to prove in court that a crime has been commited...and they do this only to not reveal openly that they can surveil without being discovered).

I would think it was a simple friend request.

The U.S. census and other government agencies only do official communication via USPS aka snail mail. Period, end of story. Anything else can be assumed to be bogus.