There’s been an intriguing story floating around that Apple has ordered a universal lifetime ban on customers accessing Facebook on in-store machines. However, it turns out to be untrue.

The story appears to have first appeared on the tech news site TinyComb which quoted an Apple Store staff member saying, “Apple Stores have become a regular Internet Cafe, so placing the most popular time-killer [Facebook] of them all on the banned-list will certainly help everyone get a chance to test out the computers”

The story certainly appeared plausible given that Apple issued a similar ban on MySpace in May 2007, back when that was the most popular social networking site.

ArsTechnica followed up the story, quoting another employee as saying the ban had been in place for a month and that it was part of centrally imposed block-list which store staff didn’t control.

It didn’t take long for someone to check out the story with old fashioned legwork, though. Caroline McCarthy of CNET checked out several New York stores and found that she could access Facebook in some, but not all stores. Meanwhile CNN got confirmation from Apple headquarters that there is no national ban and it is simply a decision taken by individual stores to cut down on people abusing the ‘demonstration’ facilities.

There is some bad news for Facebook and MySpace, however. Legislators and their staff at the Maryland General Assembly have been blocked from using both sites. If the ban was simply down to timewasting it wouldn’t be a big deal, but instead officials say the ban is to cut down a “significant increase” in viruses on the network received through the sites. That reason – and the ensuing coverage in the Wall Street Journal – may well raise the interest of system administrators in other public bodies nationwide.

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Entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 1:19 pm under Apple, Retail, Social Media.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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