I'm not sure what the implications of everyone else thinking this way will be.
Convenience, in my mind, has never been worth the price of losing anonymity.
Obviously as a human existing into some manner of time with family and friends and coworkers, I'm _known_ by those who could/should, but I don't need Amazon parsing conversations in my kitchen.
It's not a spectrum. You are a user and you are rationalizing your cognitive dissonance. Just delete it, those things are completely useless/pointless and you're being tracked regardless of whatever precautions you take. You are on it, or you are not.
Must maintain? With who? Do you use FB to exclusively chat to your wife and boss or something? Will the stasi knock at your door for not checking in with Lord Zuckerberg every 5 minutes?
I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform of communication in a digital age is Facebook. I don't mean 'primary', I mean 'only'.
If your 'friends' much less family won't keep in contact with you because of choice of platform, can you really say they are your friends/family? If we didn't live in an age of cellphones, if calling is too much effort, would they have ever come to visit me in person?
I deleted all that crap way back and only a few people came out of the wood work, the rest I forgot about and couldn't remember if I tried.
In reality the only effect social media has is lowering barriers to communication, letting in all the shit connections. Much like a dam. Lower it, and the crap water comes in. Same with this, just makes it easier to be connected, which is built on the illusion that these connections are now somehow important.
I have yet to encounter a plausible real life scenario that requires facebook. At best, it might add a tiny bit of convenience to your life wrt events/comm. But it's nothing that can't be easily replaced.
I have tried to lose these applications for a week or month at a time and I do miss out on the latest happenings with them. I have tried to switch them to different services but for one reason or another they don't like it and want to go back.
Commonly this is the switching cost of learning how a new app works but to lose those friendships are not worth the anonymity that I gain from not using the services.
I don't see it as a switching cost. Well I do, but only in the beginning. You switch the thing on and you are exposed to X more people. Then it seems like switching it off you're losing those people, but you're probably just going back to your original state.
>Commonly this is the switching cost of learning how a new app works but to lose those friendships are not worth the anonymity that I gain from not using the services.
It is to me. I would definitely make a switch for a friend if all it was was changing an app. If they can't do the same, like they literally couldn't download or use a different fucking app then they can fuck off. Like our friendship is worth so little they can't EVEN be bothered to download an app. Fuck those people.
Do you seriously call such people "friends"?
When I told my family I was getting off of those types of platforms and only using email/phone/text, there was absolutely no issues on their end keeping up with communication. If anything, I was able to cut down on the chatter and only keep up comms with two really close friends, the rest were just acquaintances that I don't mind not getting updates on.
I realize such a situation is an outlier, but you must realize that if you could not conceive of this, there's probably many more situations you could not conceive of. For better or worse, things like Facebook are now a staple in our lives. If it means being able to follow along with my daughter's growing up, I'll subscribe to whatever the hell social network she's on.
The trend has been for companies such as FB, Google, LinkedIn, etc to enforce "real name policies." And most commenter systems on large media sites want you you to login using a Google+ or Facebook account. I would say anonymity has seen a fast and steady decline.
I mean, sure, engineers built Echo/Alexa and the Equifax website. But engineers also built Signal and HIBP. Programmers vary in their concern for privacy, just like any other group, but my general experience is that they skew more privacy-conscious than the general consumer.
The writers who admit that often frame it as hypocrisy, but that's the usual sloppiness of conflating individuals with group averages. I doubt the people who wrote VTech's godawful software are particularly privacy-focused in their personal lives, while the engineers using encrypted messaging and password managers also tend to have scruples in the office.
At a certain point the whole thing feels like blaming mechanical engineers for the military-industrial complex. Sure, someone found a team that would build Predator drones, but that tells us less about mechanical engineers than it does about the government.
Techies generally like privacy in my experience, but most of them also value a steady paycheck more than they value your privacy.
Sort of like how many factory workers like fishing, but they value a steady paycheck more than they value the health of your river. And again, the suits just see the river as a free way to get rid of otherwise expensive waste.
Tech has been mostly hands-off politically, an oasis of limited targeted regulation, over the post WW2 era. While the rest of the US economy has practically been regulated to death.
Bloomberg had an opinion piece a few days ago, noting how several of the tech giants (eg Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Cisco) had higher profit margins than the S&P 500 average and argued that it was due to lack of regulation (something akin to saying we must regulate tech to make everything fair with the rest of the over-regulated economy). Such arguments in the main-stream media are increasingly becoming a daily occurrence.
Regulatory capture, increasing costs, increasing tax revenue, all things that are not aligned with the general public. Just by the opportunists on the other side of the table.
In most instances reasonable regulations allow for more innovation in the economy by making it easier for smaller companies to compete with big businesses, and to make sure that businesses don't hurt the societies and economies they operate in.
While there are good instances of over regulations, much like the myth of the welfare queen, I think its much overblown, and not an accurate diagnosis for the problems businesses are facing today in America.
Some things just don't make sense to me. Why are the default settings for something like Facebook public? Why not friends by default?
Judging by their business decisions, I have come to believe that a bunch of other would-be Secret Admirers work at some but not all tech companies, and this does inform my choice of services. I bet you $5 there were Tombstone jokes at Apple during the san bernadino fiasco.
edit: and people like Moxie are doing their very best John Cantrell impersonations and I am extremely grateful for this.
They are not, AFAIK. I mean, Facebook keeps nagging me to make my posts private every other week, even though I explicitly want to post publicly.
Facebook was a much nicer place back when they actually were public-by-default. It felt more social. Now it's just a crossover between Twitter and a rolodex.
That is how I learned to never give your real identity in an electronic world.
We told everybody that it is a bad idea.
Everybody promptly ignored our warnings. Some laughed.
I guess they don't laugh anymore, do they? Now, who was right?
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/743/