“Can you delete your profile completely?”
I want the ability to continuously erase everything I do on Facebook, except for the last N days, where N is a fixed number chosen by me.
I want the ability to continuously erase everything I do on Facebook, except for the last N days, where N is a fixed number chosen by me.
For some people, it may require a period of restructuring your life around other services before completing the process though. Here is one recipe for getting away:
First, get a browser extension that blocks the newsfeed. This will help reduce some of the psychological manipulations.
Delete all of their apps from your phone and other devices, including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Onavo.
Turn off all notifications from Facebook. If they don't stop sending notifications, start marking the emails as spam.
Download all of your FB data.
Start joining other, distributed communities to start replacing your online social life with something better: meetup groups, forums, IRC/Gitter/Slack/etc.
Whenever someone sends you a message on Facebook, immediately move the conversation to email or text message and tell them to use email or SMS to contact you, since you are moving all conversations off of Facebook in preparation for leaving the site.
Start deleting all posts, comments, and photos on the site. It can take a while, even with a script.
Don't post anything new on Facebook. Start a blog (using something like Metalsmith, Hugo, Hexo + Github Pages or Netlify) if you have an urge to post things online.
By that point, the pull of Facebook will have faded, and it should be pretty easy to leave the site and not look back.
That's what I thought until I did it. It's a big illusion in most cases. Start the process now, and you should be able to reach a point where it won't be as difficult, even if it takes a couple of years.
I suspect that many (most?) people who believe that leaving Facebook will hurt their professional lives actually hurt their professional lives more by spending so many hours on Facebook.
The average person apparently spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook. That is over 300 hours per year. Many people spend much more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook. 2.5 hours per day, 7 days per week, is almost equivalent to a part-time job. There are much more effective ways to improve social and professional life with 50+ minutes per day to work on them.
I recommend keeping track of time spent on Facebook (including reading links visited via Facebook). Compare what you learned there vs. what you would learn from spending the same amount of time reading books, taking an online course, working, or meeting people in-person instead. Or multiply that number of hours by your hourly rate...
Boy, does that ring true...
How to prevent to get there in the first place? If of any help, I can testify that life post-facebook is as colorful as one would expect.
Which most certainly doesn't delete anything, just marks it as "deleted" in the huge FB stores.
But it bothers me. Even if you don't have an account a determined researcher can learn entirely too much about you if the people around you use the service.
The WWW works best when used as intended: decentralized communities that encourage people to be creators rather than consumers.
Instead of Facebook, participate in independent online communities around your interests (for example, forums).
Instead of chat apps that attempt to envelop everyone you've ever met into monolithic walled gardens, use SMS and email.
Instead of Medium, learn how to create your own independent blog with something like Metalsmith, Hugo, or Hexo.
Etc.
My theory is that it's all about convenience and network effects. So if a fully decentralized IPFS based/alike social network would come out with mobile apps and was marketed as the way to communicate, it could have success. The big fault such projects make is to stress the technical merits and forget to play the psych-advertising game.
I've seen non-technical people have the most number of messenger apps on their phones, and some even advocated the security of their favorite messenger. Technical folks seem to be harder to persuade to join a messenger network to communicate with a new person in their life.
So I want to say once we will have a couple more high profile data breaches and centralized SPOF downtimes, people will care about security and availability, though history doesn't support they would.
There are at least two ways to perceive the world: as an "architect" or as a "consumer". The Internet/WWW should teach people how to be architects, but it's failing in many ways.
We can't all do the same thing. We can all be sandwich makers.
The internet is teaching people to do all sorts of things other than be architects.
People can be taught to at least think like architects in order to make better choices in life and understand when and how they are being manipulated by malevolent architects.
Also, one doesn't need to build million-user products to architect small changes in local communities.
An analogy: not everyone can be a good philosopher, but they should at least read philosophical ideas and be aware of them as they make decisions in life. Collective intelligence/wisdom can increased, even if most individuals are not professional philosophers.
Replacing your actual social network with anonymous internet strangers leaves you in a much worse position on the axes on which people usually criticize Facebook. Facebook may be a poor substitute for meatspace interaction with your actual community, but your connecting with your actual community is surely more important than connecting with internet strangers.
>Instead of chat apps that attempt to envelop everyone you've ever met into monolithic walled gardens, use SMS and email.
SMS is a spectacularly low-quality monolithic walled garden. Email is federated in theory but in practice is almost always Google. Both systems have the uniquely privacy-hostile property of being in cleartext by default and in the overwhelming majority of real-world usage.
Strangers are only strangers until you start communicating with them. Most people I know these days were first met through the Internet.
I suspect that most people use webmail (HTTPS), and many people don't use Gmail. I can switch my number to another carrier and people can still reach me at the same number, so it isn't exactly a walled garden. I think it's a stretch to argue that Facebook is better than email from a privacy standpoint.
How do you figure? I can communicate with SMS to anyone in the world, on any mobile provider. Seems pretty federated to me.
Sure, you can rent access from Twilio, in the same way that you can rent access from Facebook. It’s extremely unlikely that you could ever become a full participant in either network.
It's not so much about whether I personally could federate with the network, as it is about whether some reasonably large number of other entities could. I don't have exact numbers, but it seems there are 1000+ phone providers worldwide.
Social media exists for a reason. It's not just email for stupid people.
I'm not really satisfied with how anything works in my life, but many things are good enough or I've learned to accept the trade-offs.