Delete Facebook Account
deletefacebook.com
deletefacebook.com
Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.
And most importantly a place for jackasses and rich people with various complexes to show the world how great their lives are.
And Facebook is great at figuring out your weakness. For me for example, Facebook became a window for re-imagining my life in college.
No thanks. The trip down memory lane is fun every once in a while but the old picture catalog in the closet has morphed into an insidious entity, always beckoning you back. My phone vibrates, someone posted a new picture of you from 5 years ago and 50 people like it. Remember that day? All those people. Dont you?
Fuck that, I'm done being screwed with by a platform designed to give you your fix.
I guess my question is: do you use it minimally or not at all? I stopped using FB before I could get a sense for the feeling it gave me. I gather that it gives people the feelings you describe, but I wonder if that is the reality or just what people say.
Facebook was absolutely critical to the success of this event. It was put together very quickly and there's no other way we could have easily reached as many people -- and as far away -- as we did.
However, your experience is not universal and your comment, rather than criticising the platform itself, actively disparaged current users of it, which is unconstructive and offensive.
The problem is that certain types of people - irrespective of intent - are poison to other people. The problem is that we can be our own worst enemy.
How can we build a social platform and protect the users from each other? To protect the users from themselves? Especially when the steps necessary might be diametrically opposed to the bottom line. No idea. I wonder if it's even possible to devise such a system.
I believe the real problem is in us. It is not just the fact that poisonous users exist. We should be immune. We aren't because we lack the self-awareness and lack the courage to break free from these platforms when/if they become unmanageable. We should be mindful of others. We are taught to celebrate freedom, but when have we celebrated sensitivity and mindfulness of others?
He goes on to further imply those using it have low self esteem, are jackasses, or rich people with complexes. That's an addition to the comment that doesn't contribute to the discussion.
However I think opinions can be dissenting, and even incendiary like mine often are and still contribute to or spark meaningful discussion.
And this is a difference in opinion I'm fine with. If I wanted everyone to agree with me I would adopt a vastly different writing style.
His comment is both useful and germane.
if the shoe fits...
> Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.
It's amazing what a mirror Facebook is. Your Facebook description resembles very few other people's Facebook. Its nothing like mine.
I briefly worked on an app that had Facebook integration and got to see different people's feeds. Even straight white male programmer dudes like myself, each one had unrecognizably different content in their feeds. Mine is mostly baby pictures, art posts & science posts. Someone elses was entirely niche events and parties. Another was the most banal tabloid celebrity gossip. Another just seemed a random mix of every sort of media. Another was predominantly toxic right wing graphical text posts urging you to be afraid and lots of flags.
What I'm getting at here, is that I don't think Facebook itself is the problem. It's never the problem with a feed that you curate yourself.
You unfollow people if you don't want to see any of their posts.
If you like something, Facebook shows you more posts like that.
If you hide something, Facebook shows you fewer posts like that.
No one does any of that for you. Its entirely you. The result is your feed.
I like all my social media feeds because I choose what's in them. It's not the slightest bit difficult.
It works the same on Twitter. It works roughly the same on Tumblr and every social network.
Every single grandstanding "I am quitting this self curated feed platform" post is ridiculous in the same way.
It's not "me" who decides what I see. I may just want the damn broccoli, but it may take a year or two before Facebook's AI figures that out. And I sure as hell will never figure out what THEY inferred about my preferences, because there isn't any "here's what _you_ decided to see" list that summarizes my inoccuous choices...
How many signals go to the feed? How many of these are my conscious choice? And I am what you could call an expert computer user who actually worked for one of those big tech companies so I can at least imagine some of that complexity and reason about it...
Only follow people whose posts you find enjoyable and you will find Facebook enjoyable. This is entirely up to you. If you stop enjoying someone's posts, you unfollow them.
Guaranteed 100% success rate. It's not difficult or tricky. There's no gotcha, there's no fee. Most people can figure this out. I'm not sure why this isn't intuitive for the OP or yourself.
> Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.
Do you think this about federated Facebook alternatives like Diaspora?
the general concept of social networking does deserve a chance if it can be separated from gaming / preying on our psychological weaknesses.
See this experiment: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everyt...
Facebook published a study on emotional manipulation. Creepy at the least
If they ever reactivate my account, there's not much left to see.
By the way, I thought quitting Facebook was going to be hard. But I haven't regretted it a second. Same thing with Whatsapp.
Facebook/WhatsApp is a gold mine for the NSA and the CIA (as well as others). I would be surprised if they ever deleted any data when you "update" a field. It seems far more likely that they keep 100% of all data ever entered and just display the latest entry of your "update history".
Also "deletion" and "processing" are very vaguely defined terms. Data can be made inaccessible while complying with deletion, but more importantly data can be abstracted in a manner that it is accessible but still compliant with the right to be forgotten.
I've worked on a few solutions for deep analytics this past year specifically designed to keep the data while being 100% compliant with the silly GDPR regulations including the right for erasure.
This is deleting data that you have contributed yourself.
Any data you have submitted, you have to be able to revoke, and get removed.
The new EU privacy regulation is the GDPR and it has a data deletion clause but it's not absolute.
There is no EU law that mandates hard deletion of data.
Member states can have stricter laws but the two I am familiar with which are the DPA (U.K.) and BDSG (Germany) also do not mandate it.
There is also no definition of data you've submitted or data that has been collected only consent to store and or process data.
This is not something new and surprising, this has been long discussed.
https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/3-502-4080?transi...
it's terrible ux for security, it could have been much more transparent and actually encouraging proper security behaviour.
(Disclaimer: I'm a bit biased though since I'm affiliated with Threema. I think privacy in day to day communication is very important though, that was my reason for quitting.)
Since Facebook accounts can be easily reactivated by accident, or phantom causes as users here pointed out, I would next time use a tool that sent a message to each friend explaining the situation before deletion.
Says volumes about how social media manipulates people with things that don't matter one whit IRL.
that's Facebook's toxic behaviour right there. it's disgusting! purposefully (yes) driving a wedge and animosity between me and my friends because I dared to do something that you / your platform doesn't like?? fuck that. I've broken (irl) contact with people who (consistently) tried that.
this is textbook toxic behaviour and psychological manipulation, how does anyone put up with this shit.
Worse still, they've gone out of their way to make this as difficult as possible. There's no bulk delete in any of their apps or API. We all know why.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fbook-post-manager...
Of course, even if you leave out the E2E encryption, it's still about as secure as Telegram's default settings. And with E2E encryption, it should be about as secure as Signal is (I'm not a cryptographer, though, so take this with a grain of salt). However, if the user is not experienced with key verification, I'd always recommend Signal over Riot.
Agree. But that part is still alpha in current release, so I hope they will improve over time.
I don't think anyone has logged in, since none of the details have been changed.
I logged in again and re-deleted it. But I somehow doubt it's actually gone.
However, 7 years seems like a long time span for Spammers to wait and revive that data.
You could try to use the report button and say it's a fake profile.
[1] https://darekkay.com/blog/recently-checked-myspace-account/
I have seen it consuming a lot of my time in the past, and I did deactivate my account for a few months last year. I improved my life a lot, there were fewer distractions, and I generally had better self esteem. Not much was missing, except for a few conveniences I had with the account.
I have since reactivated my Facebook account, using it sparingly now. Instead, I uninstalled all IM apps from my phone, and turned off Email/slack/work notifications. I do not have the Facebook app, or the website in my bookmarks. I receive no alerts, no messages anywhere. Every week or so, I take 5-10 minutes to scroll down the News Feed (btw, doing this has the effect that I usually see much higher quality posts which Facebook thinks I've missed rather than a whole stream of memes and ads). I may or may not read the messages, and don't reply a lot. I have my email and phone number listed on my profile, so if anyone needs to really contact me, they almost always find ways to do so.
This gives me the option to use the perks at my will without being addicted and consumed by it. Visiting a city? Use the graph search to connect with friends you can visit. I can look up old photos at will if referencing anything. All this, given the fact that it's one of the only ways to connect with most of my non-tech (who rarely check their emails) friends in an asynchronous manner.
PS: This is not a comment praising Facebook. I definitely like having my privacy in my hand, out of NSA's reach. I'm just giving a reason as to why so many people might not be keen to delete their Facebook profile.
Every month or so I'll get a handful of emails from Facebook saying it looks like I'm trying to log in and asks if I need help with that. Either they're trying to get me to re-join in a very pathetic way, or someone else is trying to sign up using my email address, causing Facebook to think they want to re-activate my account.
In my opinion, the messages are fraudulent about their intentions. They misrepresent a 'security-related' incident to get me to go on the site again.
Are you sure your internet profile elsewhere is not subjecting you to doxxing attempts? I know friends who are in publishing or blogging etc. with fairly well known profiles on the internet, and they seem to be targeted far more regularly with attempted unauthorised logins to their email and social media accounts.
I was contacted by an undergraduate asking for grad school advice. Five minutes later there were several emails in the inbox from Facebook with exactly that content. I don't normally receive anything at that address (everyone I know emails me at a different address). How do you expect me to give you advice when you pull this shit on me?
I'm not sure that what they are doing is even legal. Just another reason to NEVER use the same email/password combination on multiple sites. I wouldn't be surprised if other apps are doing the same thing.
Is this a "Dark Pattern" (I'm not even going to try to parse how something can be darker than dark)? Or is it a safety feature (although maybe badly designed)?
Maybe all you have to do is shut down your ad campaign and your group. Then deactivate/delete your account. Would this not work?
Another approach would be to remove all users from the group before trying to delete the group.
Do nonprogrammers not pick up on those patterns?
I really think they don't. Thats a big part of the problem. Lay people are being tricked into thinking that their Facebook feed is a reflection of reality rather than a highly curated set of articles designed to appeal to their specific sensibilities. They have no concept of what goes into the platform behind the scenes. They have no concept of the fact that there is a building in California full of thousands of world class scientists whose sole purpose in life is to get them to check that notification on their phone. They have the illusion of choice when it is pure psychological manipulation
But you realise how much he knows about you and how much discipline you need to escape it's algorithms. For example I click on random profiles and wait for them to request my friendship (supposedly because fb suggested me to them for friendship). But sometimes I must resist clicking on really interesting people because I'm afraid fb would know too much about me.
It's even more difficult when scrolling. If I stop scrolling on something it thinks I'm interested in the same kind of content. Sometimes I slip. Fortunately I'm "friend" with very few real friends. Most of my "friends" are random people. So my timeline consists of random things that are more or less interesting depending on my mood.
The most useful things on FB are events, practicing people's names, and messenger. It's handy to try to go through the list of people who are about to go to a party so it's easier to remember them in person. Even though it is sometimes useful, it can easily take too much time.
Am I not a programmer now?
Seems a daunting task. Especially the part where you have to contact everyone you know and ask them to delete their emails and hangouts with you.
You can't. Google reserves the right to retain/use your data indefinitely:
The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).
While it's not a complete deletion, it's a step in that direction.
There are no repercussions to not abiding by the law if you leave no (usable) evidence behind.
If we're actually keeping data, then that'd be a shock to me.
So, why not just state in the terms of service that data is actually erased within N days/months after deletion? One could always list exceptions (such as business listings).
Either Google cannot really guarantee that the data is deleted (due to its storage system); Google wants to reserve the right to retain some data in the future; or it is actually retaining some data. Otherwise, there is no point in putting this in your ToS. All three reasons are pretty worrisome.
Also, what you say is provably false in a more general sense. Google retains all kinds of analytics/tracking data of internet users that you cannot have removed. When you visit a site with Google ads or analytics, Google is keeping data on you.
IIUC that is anonymized data. The whole point then is that it cannot be associated to your account, i.e. cannot be removed when you delete your account.
Otherwise, there's a shit-ton of law and regulations around this issue. I'm sure there are plenty of options for you to take when you think a company violates EU law. Safe Harbor got wrecked because a young fellow from Austria thought so and courts determined he was right.
Ten years ago, the ones telling people that agencies are storing everything by default, and Skype was bought/centralized to help with that were labeled as such. Nowdays it's "yea so"?
The same profiling is done from Safari and other Chromium / Blink browsers that have the "awesome address bar"
I have read that when you visit a page with Analytics (which is like everywhere) Chrome has special handling so as to give them a more complete dataset without it being the browser that is officially collecting it.
It's simple and straightforward to disable the autocomplete functionality in Chrome.
Not sure I follow. Why can't chrome just detect whether you entered a URL or not? If URL, load without sending to Google. If not a URL, send as search to Google.
And who can decrypt that?
In Firefox, back when it was introduced in Fennec somewhere around 2007 or 2008 (I don't know how it is now), you'd need 2 passwords. One to log in to your Firefox account and gain access to your encrypted data, and one to decrypt the data. It is feasible a nationstate can get access to your encrypted data, but it isn't feasible they are able to decrypt your data.
The problem, though you didn't put it that way, is deleting other people's data. That's not your presence on Google, it's theirs.
1. Log in to your google account 2. go to https://www.google.com/settings/takeout (this doesn't work with the regional googles like 'google.co.uk' fwiw) 3. You should see a page called 'Download your data' with all the services selected. If you want to deselect anything, do, otherwise hit 'Next' 4. If you want to change the format or chunk size, do it here. Otherwise hit 'Next' 5. Wait. This can take a few days if your google account is big. 6. You'll get an email with a link to one or more archives to download. All your stuff will be in there in open formats. 7. You can delete your google account (I think from https://myaccount.google.com/preferences?pli=1#deleteservice... ) but it won't delete info they have on you in their caches
Have a nice day.
Sean
If you don't own the server, say no more. What about caches? PDF?
Is one individual entitled to the record of interactions and memories formed by 2 individuals?
A real world comparison would be to letters. Would you claim the right to have a correspondent to burn any letters you sent? I certainly wouldn't.
[1]: Right to be forgotten: http://www.eugdpr.org/key-changes.html
Wonder what the internet would be like if there was an easier way to make money than ads.
I cut out facebook and all news save HN and a couple of subreddits and a strictly local news site.
My life has improved.
I prefer to see it as restricting information flow to that I am strictly interested in, or has a potential real-life impact on me (local news). It's a bubble of my choosing curated by me.
And I would try and escape the bubble not by expanding my online exposure to dis/information, but by getting out into the real world and doing more stuff there.
I stopped using Facebook and I don't follow mainstream news. I don't hear much about Trump or North Korea but I read my subreddits (I dropped /r/politics) and learn about Rojava in Syria, talk with my friends about the Diversity Memo and work hard to hear a detailed woman's view on the matter, or hit my YouTube subscriptions to find a lecture on physics or social issues.
I still 100% have a bubble but I don't think adding Facebook or MSM back in to my life would in any way improve the fidelity of my view on the world.
In my opinion MSM looks like garbage from any angle and Facebook just began to feel unhealthy (for me).
I'm not saying I don't sympathise with your approach as a persons time is only finite. But if you are interested in fact or even just balanced opinion then you do need to be aware of the bubble you're creating and be willing to question what you read / hear on any issues of importance.
I am not cutting myself off from one side of mainstream news. I am cutting myself off completely.
I have no idea what is happening with Trump or North Korea. I am vaguely aware there was a flood in Texas.
The subreddits I subscribe to are special interest subs that have nothing to do with mainstream news or opinions, and are relevant and assist real world activities I do.
I only read local news that could actually be relevant to me, like a new restaurant opening up in town, or special interest sites like HN that feed my professional interest in technology and programming.
I have old been cold turkey for about 6 weeks, but I hope to get to the point where I have no knowledge of whatever "big stories" (or small) the MSM is occupied with.
My basic philosophy is that the main/only thing important in life is achieving my personal goals, and the only stuff worth knowing about is things that can directly affect that outcome.
I'm looking forward to walking in to work one day and see everyone's ashen face turn to surprise at my apparent indifference to some big "world event". Talk to me when life changes in my 50km real world bubble.
Addiction to mainstream news does nothing to help me achieve my life goals. I have friends who (I think) satisfy the definition of addition, when it comes to watching hours of news a day. What a waste of precious time.
Wasn’t the goal decentralization?
When we’re discussing "decentralizing" things, these things become important. In those cases, we shouldn’t give such companies any influence in any way. As we’ve seen with Google a few days ago, relying on funding from a company can end up with you having to either give up your project, or follow their demands.
(this was years ago, before I even had a real account)
At one point I figured that I might need it to seem normal sometime in the future.
Traveling to the US last year I'm glad I did, passed through the border checkup much easier than my other privacy loving friends who deleted thei social media accounts.
I also kept my gmail address even though I moved to fastmail. Mostly use it for signing up to things and unimportant stuff, but it sure was handy at the airport.
I guess it still exposes some of my life, but it's not like I can ever become anonymous again, since they never delete anything.
This is sad. As a US citizen, I have no idea how to even begin fighting crap like this.
The issue is the EFF and ACLU aren't going to be able to get sweeping legislative changes themselves. We, the constituency, need to be very vocal action as well.
I just feel ignored and dismissed by my Congress Critters.
I mean, they would probably still have cleared me if they had access to the full story, I'm not that much of a deviant. But take the board game nights as an example. A few of my friends smoke weed at those, and even though I haven't done that for 10 years, it's not something I'd want to be associated with on a social media site that a government trawls, so I make sure to keep that part out of the pictures.
On the other hand if you lack these things that everyone is expected to have, they become suspicious.
I didn't even bother asking for copy of my data or w/e. And I don't even care if NSA or whoever has a copy of it. By making leaving facebook hard, it made me bitter about it back then. Hopefully my account will be deleted from facebook and i never have to see use that site again.
P.S. Thanks for the link HN, I'd volunteer my personal data to some of the people here if they ever needed to compete with FB A.I! o/
https://web.archive.org/web/20120719002103/http://betabeat.c...
Surely I can create a fake account for that, but then you also need to resist the peer pressure of people trying to add you as “friends” all the time.
Every business will try to tie you down as much as possible. Fb just has something very nice and heavy knots.
Better yet, a girl you dated for the past 3 years but then broke up with could have tons of knowledge about you, and photos, and videos, but unless you're a politician, celebrity, or high-level business executive, where's the risk there? I'm not saying it's risk-free for everyone, but for the majority of people, it effectively is. Even just consider how Snapchat became so popular among teenagers over the last few years; new generations use new technologies, including, in this case, computer programs, which are now called apps, and even Windows 10 retrofitted that word from smartphones to desktop computers.
Eh, no, that isn't the same at all.
There's 2 clear cases where this is proven:
1) In the case the company still uses profiling on your personal data in order to profit from you. (Or, if they still contact you in relation to your supposedly deleted account as pointed out by people throughout this thread.)
2) In the case of a security breach the data used for profiling (which was supposedly deleted) can be breached, shared, etc (a good way to figure out where spam comes from is using catch-all e-mail addresses something which ironically works great with Gmail).
For people in the EU, if they ask a company to delete their account, that company has to comply which includes any and all of their data. I don't know how it is for US but as a general statement I do wish our friends overseas including in the land of the free have solid laws to protect the individual citizens since I find that an integral part of a free nation.
Even from a moral PoV it makes sense (not that publicly owned companies have any sense of moral). Because in the end with a profiling service company you are the product, gaining access to a gratis service. When you decide to stop using the service, you are no longer benefiting from them; why should they benefit from you in the years to come? With security risks attached?
> Better yet, a girl you dated for the past 3 years but then broke up with could have tons of knowledge about you, and photos, and videos, but unless you're a politician, celebrity, or high-level business executive, where's the risk there?
No offence, this is very ignorant. Everyone has something to hide. Moreover, revenge porn is an example which perfectly fits your scenario. But that was done with consent at that moment; there's other complex scenarios where the cat is out of the bag like bullying videos on the school yard.
> Even just consider how Snapchat became so popular among teenagers over the last few years
And there are many ways to record the data received via Snapchat. As long as the space between device and eyes is analog, there's always going to exist one loophole there. A loophole you won't hear Snapchat about as it doesn't serve their investors/shareholders.
Snapchat would've been very cute in the '90s before people had e.g. cameras on their phones, and when phone screens were lower quality (although it'd be problematic to make a picture in the first place then). Nowadays, its painfully obvious how irrelevant the service is.
The only relevance Snapchat has is their userbase, mainly consisting of youth; personal data, the databank as a whole (pretty much the same but worth mentioning), and the potential to start a new service under the Snapchat flag.
https://googleblog.blogspot.be/2009/12/personalized-search-f...