Quitting Facebook is pointless; challenging them to do better is not
zephoria.org
zephoria.org
1. I don't want to gamble again that Facebook will "do better". They've shown many times they actually want to share my personal information in unexpected ways under the cover of ever increasingly-confusing settings pages. Thanks, but I'm done with this crap.
2. From the post: I do not believe that the tech elites who are publicly leaving Facebook will affect on the company’s numbers
Us alone will not affect the numbers but we take people with us. We tell our friends and family to close their accounts.
But I have a good case.
I would rather join a group "Join this group to emphasize facebook to add simpler privacy controls" than quit facebook. I don't want to lose it. I care.
All said, I don't regret not having a Facebook account. And even so, they do still have data on me, thanks to family members and friends (who have sent invitations to join, etc.).
Unfortunately, I don't think most people will care until they're made aware of exactly how much information is being (and can be) collected and what people can do with it.
Google is the same, actually, in terms of potential for misuse, except that I trust the current leaders more. The worry, though, is how long that will last?
Quitting Facebook doesn't stop your friends from sharing pictures that include you that you may not want out there.
(1) Even if decentralization is not a panacea, it remains the only solution for a host of problems. Including privacy on the internet. Also, personal server as easy to use as Facebook itself are definitely possible. When such servers actually ship, they will be worth the hassle.
(2) Everyone should quit every centralized services on this planet, including Facebook, provided there is an alternative. The logs they gather are just too scarily comprehensive.
That, and 2 most disturbing points:
(1) This post actually encourages us to stay dependent on a big corporation, in the hope that we could influence it for our own good. No, we can't. If we are dependant, they can screw us, and will do so as soon as it yields money.
(2) It fears that more free systems could be used to do child pornography, among other crimes. To me that's FUD: even if she's right, that doesn't mean that the criminality will rise, nor that the criminals will be harder to catch. And we already have Freenet.
Sarcasm aside, as long as the service's users are not directly providing all of the revenue to provide that service, there will always be a conflict between the interests of the users (i.e. do not want info shared) and the payers (i.e. want to know how best to advertise).
>"I think that we owe it to the users to challenge Facebook to live up to a higher standard, regardless of what we as individuals may gain or lose from their choices."
People need to learn to think for themselves and live with the consequences of their choices. It's not rocket science.
Just a weird article.
But your friends might and that is the problem.
My friends did not switch en masse to some other service I was using; they still organise parties on Facebook.
A few people quitting Facebook only makes it less ubiquitous at the margins.
That's the scenario I'm thinking would happen. You are but one leaf on the social tree of your friends.
When Facebook loses one user, the quality of their network drops ... insignificantly from a single user, but when speaking about multiple users quiting, then you've got a network effect.
So ironically (thinking about TFA) if you care about the quality of their service the most effective thing you can do is to just quit using it. That will send a message more powerful than bitching and moaning about it in blog posts.
It is a big mistake to overlay a monetary system on your friends. This is one aspect users are really getting riled-up with, "monetising friends".
I dont miss it. There are a few email addresses on there that I wish I had written down, so I guess there is some value, but is that value worth the wasted time getting sucked up in a live status stream (or worse: Your data in such stream)? Looking and commenting on peoples wall? Gossiping? Its a trashy medium, just like the tabloid medium before it, only with different recognizable people and with your life on display as well.
Similarly, you can quit Facebook (and I have). Now I have friends I can't interact with online, because we don't have any websites in common any more.
You don't have their e-mail address? Or they don't look at their inbox? Or certain specific activities are done via Facebook, while others may be done via e-mail? And most of all, why? Why did they chose Facebook over e-mail?
More generally, I'd like to know what they use Facebook for, and why.
We tend not to share e-mail addresses. Different people use different services (LiveJournal/DreamWidth, Facebook, Twitter, Monochrome, etc) to different extents. Parties get organised on LiveJournal, Facebook or Monochrome.
I don't use e-mail socially because it's a terrible medium for group conversation.
> [e-mail sucks at] group conversation.
Maybe you actually meant that web based mail sucks at group conversation? Or that e-mail sucks at live group conversation? If so, I agree.
Now, if you actually meant what you wrote, I disagree for 2 reasons: (1) in my experience, forums and mailing lists are basically the same, once filters are set up. (2) centralizing most of my communications to one gateway is far more manageable than having to check several web sites. 2 inboxes is one too many. E-mail notifications help, but at this point, I'd rather use e-mail directly.
1. You can't edit past e-mails. This means that if you change the date or venue of your party, I have to discard the original e-mail and preserve the new one instead.
Whereas if it's a Facebook event, you update the details, I get notified about the change automatically, and the original, now incorrect details don't exist anywhere any more; I can't refer to them by mistake.
2. Most e-mail clients suck. Most of my friends are not IT geeks, so most of my friends use an e-mail client that sucks. Which means many of my friends use an e-mail client that doesn't have decent threading support, or makes it too easy to reply-to-sender when they meant reply-to-all, or doesn't properly elide quoted text, or etc.
Which means most of my friends suck at group e-mail conversation. And therefore it sucks for them and me.
I realise that group social e-mail conversations work for you, but they don't work for me.
Zuckerberg does have a point ... most users just authorize whatever app wants permissions to their data with whatever permissions are asked for. This I know from experiencing the integration of my app with Facebook.
For app developers Facebook is basically a "whois" for users ... with a single and painless authorization you get access to their name, photo, email and list of friends. If you want to change that, then provide a better alternative.