1 in 10 Americans in survey say they deleted their Facebook account over privacy
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
But lots of people told me they did. Probably 30% of people I know.
Some actually deleted.
Some said they did and didn’t (really weird since you can see their account).
Some thought they did, but screwed it up.
Some said they did but switched to Messenger, or WhatsApp or some other part of Facebook.
Over the past 5 years, not a single friend has stayed off Facebook. Although it would be cool to install an app that actually tracked this to see people who stay off.
I was hoping that this article would talk about how they did the survey through Facebook :)
I deleted my Facebook account 2 years ago and haven't been back since, so not sure if the above is still true.
also... not satire. though, that feedback is appreciated.
You might know a lot of people who want social cred for deleting their accounts, without actually deleting them. But it's also possible that Facebook is keeping those accounts active on purpose so others will continue interacting with them, which is a tool of temptation they can use to get those users to come back.
100% of the people I am deleted their Facebook account long ago, based on a fairly dispassionate assessment of the user experience and the loss of productivity when saddled with it.
You can just post that you're abandoning the account with where to reach you online, log out, delete the cookies, and block their domain (what I did) and have the same effect with the bonus that friends can still reach you if they wonder where you went.
Haven't really got an alternative and I don't want to be "that guy" but it's made Facebook usable for me.
I don't think most facebook users think this way. The big conflict in my experience with the FB scandal is that tech people understand that it's much easier to just keep data around than to track down and delete all of it, whereas users think about it differently.
I believe users conceptualize their access to facebook to be like their access to icloud or dropbox, where they have direct control over their data and when they delete it, it is deleted on the FB servers. (I suppose. Although icloud and dropbox probably keep some records of this data as well.) A coder would be able to intuit that it's much easier to simply flag "deleted" accounts as invisible to other users and keep the data around. Also, using the term "delete" ends up (intentionally or unintentionally) misleading people to think that way, and the 'onerous' nature of deleting leads to a cognitive dissonance where users think that because they worked so hard to 'delete' their account, it was more likely to be actually deleted.
This is part of a culture which is completely pervasive among tech companies of simply keeping all data around forever because until recently there has been zero reason not to, and you might need it later.
Let's hope not, for Zuck's sake, because he just testified in front of Congress that when you delete your account it's gone from Facebook's servers for good.
Then sure they delete YOUR data, but all the inferencial data such as which sites you clicked like on, which sites you signed into with Facebook, the type of commentary or information you share you made/shared isn't yours and the knowledge gained also isn't the users it's Facebook's so that'll all be there. So sure they won't have your face or name, but they'll know everything else about you that makes you you.
Anyway most people don't even know that Facebook owns Instagram or WhatsApp, so no matter what they say unless they are tech savvy they have up at most an account on Facebook, but not it's subsidiaries (I believe).
I guess we know different people? It’s probably one of the challenges when talking in terms of anecdotes.
- Hardly anyone writes back the recipients, often copied in the different layers of the email, so disinformation spreads without being corrected; but
- Spammers gladly collect the emails through those anyway.
https://penguindreams.org/blog/discoverying-friend-list-chan...
Because I've lived in so many places and different countries, there are a lot of people who I can only communicate with over Messenger. I usually use the purple-facebook and purple-hangouts plugins.
I never read status updates. I only update my status to promote my other blogs/websites.
I guess I could switch to sending international texts or ask people for their e-mails (which also means asking them to remove my e-mail from spam since I run my own e-mail server and Google/Microsoft don't really use DMARC/DKIM/SPF and always mark my stuff as spam), but messenger is just easier.
I think we'll only see people get rid of Facebook when there are better alternatives to connect on. Even then it's dumb to delete a Facebook account; just stop using it like people did with MySpace.
There is one type of "revolution" that arguably cannot be started on Facebook.
The revolution to reclaim privacy from Facebook, to free ourselves from Facebook surveillance.
Whenever this "conflict of interest" comes up, there is an unforgettable 1970 song I recall hearing as a youth.
Hint 1: It was written before "rap" existed but many rappers and other artists attribute this man's work as a precursor to hip-hop.
Hint 2: It has a repeating chorus that expresses a similar "conflict of interest", involving a different "revolution" and a different medium.
Can any HN reader guess the song?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16686723
This is why I prefer clients and browsers small enough that I can edit and recompile quickly even on a computer with low resources.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_Be_T...
More reasonable: escalating partial dis-engagement. Here's what I did, sequentially, over the years:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
Recovery rates for heroin addicts "ranges from 35-65%" [1]. And Facebook isn't as addictive as heroin.
[1] http://crehab.org/2017/08/14/heroin-addiction-why-the-recove...
Anecdotally, I'm had several friends completely had their lives ruined by benzodiazapene addiction (usually in the form of street-pressed xanax [alprazolam]), so personally I would probably rather be addicted to heroin than benzos (not that I would want to be addicted to either)
Would be amazed if even half the "yes" responders actually did. Wouldn't be surprised if literally none of them had.
Probably the best way for most people to "resist" would be to block FB tracking, and anyone who sells it to them, at the browser level. If enough people did, that swing the "materially hurt FB" vs "keep my personal utility of the platform" balance into the positive.
edit: to clarify I meant the respondees lying.
I went to my Facebook and found 8% of my friend list deactivated. I would be surprised if this entire hoopla resulted in more than 1% deletion but even 1% in NA is 1.8M accounts. That is around $200M a year loss for fb. Not a big deal, but their valuation is based on forward growth, so not tiny either
Roughly 1.5% of my friends list was deleted. Probably closer to 1 as I think some of them deleted a long while back.
I think it's important to spread the message that life goes on outside of FB. If you delete, you'll be in good company.
In a less extreme version, try not using it for 10 days and notice how you feel. There will be withdrawal, but if you can't pause a behavior for 10 days, you're probably addicted. Maintaining relationships outside of FB is like riding a bike and it'll feel awkward not to be involved in the "Did you see on FB" conversations at first, but you'll be past it in no time and back to more present conversations.
That's interesting. I think a lot of people would say they are in worse company. And that it takes a lot of effort to find that good company offline.
Bad news: Apparently it only works if you have an account. Go figure...
I also deleted the instagram app from my phone, and blocked reddit on all my PCs. Hackernews might be next I'm afraid - I just don't see that it's a good use of my time anymore. I've even been considering getting a non-smartphone next time I need a new phone. Maybe it's just a reaction to everything going on online, but I'm enjoying being free from social media.
In short, your data doesn’t hardly matter. Facebook is capable of generating tons of meta-data that you have no control over.
Proof:
On Facebook, create a targeted ad, targeting people who have secret property "X"; the ad should be about a product "Y" not involving X.
Wait for people to click the ad, visiting your website, and buying the product Y. Now you know the identities of these people coupled to the fact that they have property X.
This also works for Google.
It will be interesting to compare this 9% figure with the change in users that Facebook reports at their next earnings release.
So, we might not have gained more hope on privacy issues, but at least we now know that a lot more people will outright lie and BS when polled on the matter, than we previously thought....
Because that is the real metric... not how many people left, but how does it compare to the retention rate prior to the recent events?
right
This continued through my young adulthood, during which time the traditional media was covering the suicide of Tyler Clementi and later Aaron Schwarz. I noticed the tool routinely used for cyberbullying, outing classmates of alternate sexualities, contact with strangers and subsequent dysfunctional communication, race hate, other forms of anomic and disinhibited communication, abusive surveillance of individuals within human courtships, and the routine use of aliases. Violence associated with online "socialization" continues to escalate in countless communities. Later, the implementation of Facebook Live would popularize its worldwide use for live video broadcast of interpersonal physical violence. Knowing the marketing effects of most other media, the deployment of that particular functionality was probably a given after the Clementi suicide.
The effects of the tool upon partly-or-entirely political processes such as election, incarceration, hiring, policing, etc., are still for-profit and poorly-characterized. With a user count in the billions, billions in value, contracts with data mining firms, use as a media outlet by municipalities in lieu of traditional public media, its probably safe to say they are sizable and wholly-undemocratic. It is comedic that the idea of "democratization" is used in conjunction with a technology whose aim is to recontextualize friendship as an interaction which occurs at an extreme distance and with intensive record-keeping, as opposed to the chance in-person encounter of individuals with their spoken narratives in an agora, square, etc.
The sort of behavior for which Facebook exists and continues to exist is the exact behavior legislated against upon the now-decommissioned ARPANet. The internet was never open or free. To say now, "The internet should neither be commercial nor political, but can be free" is too late, a lie, and unfair. The Kindle is a great device. Text messaging may be a small improvement to the human condition, like the lightbulb, or motor cartage. Remarks on Facebook are likely confined to the realm of observation.
Media is not inherently social. For it to be social, its purpose has to be removed from a dominant narrative and subsequent revenues upon this narrative, which is necessarily impossible. Community farming, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social. Healthcare, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social.
I post these remarks only to document my experiences for posterity. I cannot undo the damage these tools and their attached profit motives have done to my life, but I can note them publicly.
Although I don't personally use Facebook I think most people who like it should just continue using it but just think more carefully about the information they share. Deleting now isn't going to bring back the data that has already been shared.