Reasons You Should Quit Facebook
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>> 10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided
No they aren't. In return for accepting them, you get to use the site. See? Two-sided.
>> 9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior
Then he proceeds to list one unproven allegation, and one lawsuit settlement. We sometimes settle lawsuits where the negative outcome, although unjust, is likely enough that the settlement is probably cheaper. These points so laughably fail the "documented" standard that I should just stop reading now, but I can't.
>> 8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy
They are responding to their users' preferences. If anything, users have declared war on privacy. The site is designed to shared information about yourself. If signing up for that site is not an invitation to privacy invasion, what is? And is it surprising that someone who believes most people want to share information about themselves, as the CEO of Facebook surely must, does not care about privacy as much as the author, who is obviously all about it?
>> 7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch
Members, by and large, don't care. It's not Facebook's responsibility to constantly nag people about the privacy implications of setting their privacy settings to "off". It would make the site more difficult and annoying to use, and would likely have immeasurably small impact.
>> 6. Facebook is a bully
Wait, are we complaining about how Facebook fails to protect user privacy, or how Facebook is overzealous in protecting user privacy? It's flat out false that Facebook sued this guy. They did force him to cease and desist by threatening to sue him. Maybe they should update their robots.txt, but that's hardly a reason to stop using them.
>> 5. Even your private data is shared with applications [that you install]
Oh, just like my regular computer. Should I stop using that too? Most Facebook applications rely on some set of private data to make interesting features work. Installing these applications would be a usability nightmare for people who have their privacy shields turned up, which ironically would probably decrease the number of people using those settings. This is because most of Facebook's users, even the ones with privacy settings turned up, only care about privacy when it doesn't get in their way, and when having to choose between privacy and easy functionality, they will take the latter.
>> 4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted
They are dealing with an enormous attack surface and highly motivated attackers. I think what you mean to say is, "Facebook's engineers cannot perfectly cover all possible vulnerabilities that their business requirements expose them to." They are normally quick with responses and fixes, so that's a problem, but not one that any other company doing this would avoid. But the whole "technically competent" thing is BS. They are obviously technically competent based on the various open source projects they have released and which are seeing wide adoption.
>> 3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account
If my friends are any indication, many people who delete their accounts eventually want them back. Keeping those people from making a mistake they will later regret is probably a feature.
As far as making no promises about deleting your data, I can say that especially in a NoSQL environment it's very difficult to track down every little piece of data that belongs to a user. Sometimes this data is in formats that are not mutable on an individual-record basis. At my workplace we sometimes aggregate data in SSTables (see the Bigtable paper for details) that, did they contain user data, would not be immediately modifiable for each user that wanted to delete their account.
>> 2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web
This is not an issue for most normal people. But if it is an issue for you and you want to make a moral statement by closing your Facebook account, by all means, do. Facebook's incentives for maintaining their walled garden to some extent probably outweigh the loss of every user account for every person that even cares an iota about this issue.
>> 1. The Facebook application itself sucks
Seems like a lot of people like it and derive some use out of it. Sorry you don't.
This article is idiotic. Most of the points are flat out false, and the rest are taste issues where the author is out of touch with the zeitgeist.
So they claim, but users already had the option of making everything public. Removing options is not motivated by the wishes of the users.
The site is designed to shared information about yourself.
The site was designed to share that information with a particular group of people selected by the user.
9. True.... just as true as the counter-argument. Choosing whether to have a settlement or not is in all cases choosing between having your name cleaned or loosing a substantial amount of money (and that is in case you're actually innocent of the accusations).... when Facebook's CEO decided to go for the settlement he clearly stated he'd rather have the money than the clean name - enough said.
8. "The site is designed to shared information about yourself." ...... with the people in my life(as the slogan says) NOT with the people who'd like to spy on it.
7. "Members, by and large, don't care.".... Yeah, right, and you're basing this on what serious grounds!?!?!? My statistics professor would probably say - if you're not completely sure ...... avoid to assume.
6."Maybe they should update their robots.txt, but that's hardly a reason to stop using them.".... yeah, hey, while we're on it, why not use this old cable wire to tie all the expensive TVs and stereos we have around the house - just because it's old-dated and will potentially fail doesn't mean we shouldn't be using it too.
5."This is because most of Facebook's users, even the ones with privacy settings turned up, only care about privacy when it doesn't get in their way, and when having to choose between privacy and easy functionality, they will take the latter." - Is it just me or you're assuming far too much..... plus if FB's considers most of it's users to be morons, I don't want such a friend, thank you.
4. "They are obviously technically competent based on the various open source projects they have released which are seeing wide adoption." ..... uhm, like which ones!?! Seems to me FB is adopting ALL other open source applications available.(thus becoming increasingly more unusable and annoying but that's a whole other story)
3. "If my friends are any indication, many people who delete their accounts eventually want them back. Keeping those people from making a mistake they will later regret is probably a feature." - Now that's so thoughtful - I do exactly the same when my girl friends want their crappy lame a$$ boyfriends back right after a break-up just because they haven't seen any better..... Now seriously, if only FB admins would do the same as I would with a friend and NOT MESS IN...
2. "Facebook's incentives for maintaining their walled garden to some extent probably outweigh the loss of every user account for every person that even cares an iota about this issue." - maybe if they CARED ENOUGH TO EXPLAIN IT properly to their users, it would bother more of them.
1. "Seems like a lot of people like it and derive some use out of it. Sorry you don't." - HA HA, by "deriving use" you must mean the people all the regular FB users are trying to PROTECT FROM - ad agencies, etc. who derive PROFIT out of the FB platform and the way it's rules are constantly being twisted for legalising spying and obtaining personal information without permission. You actually sound like you're one of these people.... hmmmmm, strange.
All in all – I don’t completely agree with the idea of permanently deleting your FB profile – it can be fun and relaxing and useful, especially for people like me who have friends they can’t visit as often as they’d like. BUT the recent privacy changes and the secrecy (or not so wide publication and promotion) alerted me that something seriously wrong is going on and I know a lot of people harmed by it in one way or another ( their pictures used inappropriately, their job information exploited, etc.). So I’m saying what I’ve always had in mind when using the internet to upload anything – what goes in never comes completely out…. IF YOU DON’T WANT SOMETHING TO BE PUBLICLY KNOWN – DON’T PUT IT ON THE INTERNET.
Why am I pointing this out? Because I think my attitude represents a huge chunk of Facebook's users, and I think most of what's left over after you subtract that chunk consists of people who don't care about privacy period.
I use LinkedIn for business. I use Twitter for geeky stuff. I use Facebook for non-geeky stuff and to post pictures of my kids in their halloween costumes. It all seems to be working out OK for me.
A common mistake people make here is to think they represent the majority. Hacker news is a very small community.
Your statement is true in general. But tptacek (the author of the parent comment to your comment) did not write his comment as one HN insider speaking to others, but as a technically aware Facebook user to others. My personal observation of Facebook user behavior (including my many Facebook friends who are not at all hackers) squares with his. My favorite kind of link to post on Facebook is any well written link about security issues with Facebook. My friends read those, and share them with their friends, and most of the friends are reasonably cautious in how they use Facebook. We still have a good time. I don't see Facebook advertisements because I run a general ad-blocker on my browser. I don't sign up for Facebook applications in general. I just have good conversations (much like this one with you) with friends who know me in real life, about links that we find interesting.
It's not hard to untag yourself from dodgy photos, leave silly groups, clean up your profile and put professional contacts in a restricted list. Most importantly though, I've come to the conclusion most people expect you to have dirt on Facebook. If your boss wants to be your friend on Facebook and doesn't get why you won't actually share any personal info with them... well, good luck to you, but my professional contacts all seem to understand (and often reciprocate for the same reasons).
That photo you untagged yourself from but your friend is in so mutual friends can still see it - I'll agree that's a problem, but not worth throwing a hissy about. We "lost our privacy" the day the camera was invented.
Baseless generalization. There's some age correlation there, no doubt, but I know people over 30 who use Facebook as enthusiastically as the most social of high-schoolers, and I know people under 30 who won't touch it. At least among the technically inclined, Facebook usage style is more a matter of personal disposition than age. It's stupid to say nobody over 30 has anything useful to say about the site.
And the over-30-year-olds I know who make minimal use of Facebook? They have plenty clue "about how Facebook actually works", thank you; due to their years of experience I find them often more clueful than the most voracious teenage user. They just choose to use the site differently, or not at all, regardless of their level of understanding.
I myself am well under 30, by the way, lest you accuse me of an age group bias.
Also, your conception of "real users" sure sounds an awful lot like a minority group of users who use it heavily.
Why don't you tell us how we would go about doing that?
Have a read of this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070720160253/http://blog.pmarca...
The author was over 30 and he's now on the FB board.
I post and upvote links to these kinds of stories because I believe my family and friends do not use Facebook like you do, and are being tricked into sharing more than they mean to.
I am sure that this is not the average user experience!
Maybe, but your interactions are still inferable. If you have friends their interactions with you are also inferable. Anyone or any group you associate with in Fb has the same problem. In some ways what Fb can infer is just as much a problem. So the question remains, "how useful is inference of data to Fb really going to be?"
Do you consider the websites you browse to be private?
I really think that the vast majority of Facebook's users just don't care. Remember the Beacon debacle? That big group had what, 300k people or something? A tiny part of the userbase. I could be remembering these details wrong, though.
1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311406
edit: I bring up the score because there's obviously a lot of "OMG FACEBOOK SUCKS" posts going around. But obviously there's a lot of people that also disagree. It's not all just Facebook hate, or my comment wouldn't have gotten voted up in the first place.
Anyway, as I, and many others have said here before, it's not just about what you post, it's about what _others_ post about you.
Check out (linked to in the posted article_ http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ to see what others expected.
I have plenty of non-geeky friends and acquaintances who expected the same thing. This isn't something that only us (some of us, I should say) HNers care about: this is a gross violation of trust.
Excellent compendium of reasons to quit: thanks for the article!
The ten points listed in this blog are of absolutely no concern to the average Facebook user.
(Making the assumption that Facebook will be replaced this way is kind of stupid; Facebook is competent, MySpace wasn't.)
Google, World of Warcraft, Facebook, Windows... all of these things conquered their respective markets in such a massive way that every direct competitor is playing catch-up or giving up on reaching the same goals.
MySpace, like pre-Google search sites, was an obvious stepping stone on the path of social networking applications' evolution. It was terribly bad at almost everything and succeeded for a time purely due to demand for something of its general taxonomy.
Facebook, however, is a very thoughtfully realized effort that is largely an agreeable experience for users. As long as they continue to avoid introducing negative changes slowly and with minimal exposure to users, those users will continue to stick around and bring in others. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog]
And the big problem, one that I haven't seen addressed yet, is where people should go when they leave Facebook. There is no comparably-featured competitor, nor one even close. And of course, social networking applications are worthless without the people you want to interact with using them with you.
Say what you will about Facebook's policies, the company is run extremely well.
Everything eventually comes to an end; Google, Facebook, etc will be no different. It's just a matter of time.
They have been stuck with a low-end image for a very long time and will not be able to take back the lost momentum from Facebook. Add this to the fact that it has been bought out by Murdock, which means there is very little incentive money-wise for those employees to put in the same amount of effort that went into pre-sale Myspace and Facebook.
Just because the previous top social network eventually faded away doesn't mean we should expect the current one to do the same in any similar manner or time frame. There's quite a lot that differentiates today's Facebook and the MySpace of old. For one thing, how many third parties ever built on MySpace as an application platform, to the extent that they are today with Farmville and Microsoft Docs and the like?
I agree with your comment in general, but that statement isn't true. Apple are still a niche player, except maybe in America.
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Facebook to me is an enhanced contact list. Most of the people I know treat it the same way. The ability to stay in contact and re-connect with friends, contacts, and acquaintances who you no longer interact with on a daily basis is its main feature.
But the "social" aspect of the games and apps available on Facebook's platform is a novelty, and once that novelty wears off, what's the attraction? Facebook as a layer on top of the open internet to signal what I "like"? What's the point?
I think that Facebook are scrambling now to try to find a viable business model, and trying to establish themselves as a _platform_, broadly defined, because they realize that there are severe limits to how far you can monetize social networks, but they haven't really figured out how to leverage their success as a social network to expand into something that can sustainably generate revenue.
When you get a new phone, put in your facebook details, it will pull down all the info you need to phone your friends, email, etc.
You get access to all your photos, games, etc...
Maybe even your web bookmarks with the latest facebook effort.
You no longer need an email address, you just use facebook - this cuts out so much spam.
Facebook could become the internet for a lot of people.
The main reason is that I don't use it, and people that friend me might feel bad because I never reply. Now that won't be a problem -- I won't even exist there. Follow me on Twitter instead.
my post is here, slacktivism and why i quit facebook: http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2010/04/slacktivism-and-why-i-qu...
glad to hear the mouvement is growing.
If you don't like Facebook, just quit and get a drink with your friends.
Kind of hard to keep track. I wouldn't have expected this document to be such a fast-moving target.
This is just a classic balance between security and openness.
The more secure you try to make things, the less usable things become, and the more you worry about things you don't need to worry about. The more open you make things, the easier and more efficient things become, and life is more enjoyable. You might get bruised and cut every once in a while, but it's the price you pay for a more open, fun, and social life.
I'm in agreement with Zuckerberg on this. Openness is the future, whether we like it or not, and you can either fight it and become a hippie 2.0, or just go with the flow and enjoy the advantages that come with.
Zuckerberg has a huge incentive to promote the idea that privacy is passe or somehow doesn't matter, because the more he can convince his users to accept having their data made public, the more value he can deliver to his customers.