Yes, You Should Delete Facebook
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Is this part of the American culture? I'm from Europe and while there is a lot of people sharing every single thing on Facebook here, I would say that most of the people never really post or follow stuff on Facebook. People don't really care that much about the social showoff. Most of people use Facebook because it is really convenient for contacting other people and organizing events, and that's it.
Can't you just use Facebook when you find it convenient and then just move on with your life?
Show-offs are also probably a problem, too; more so that there are less social expectation to peg them down a notch in the US.
I absolutely you can make Facebook work for you, but that requires to give it negative feedback (blocking or hiding people, hiding ads) and people have a strong aversion to this, on both sides of the Atlantic -- including data scientists who should know better about training models with balanced feedback.
For example, here is a TED Talk by a very smart person on "Why you should quit social media": https://www.ted.com/talks/cal_newport_why_you_should_quit_so... but listen to his arguments and you see that most of his objections are to the mode of social media use in the present day, i.e., smartphones.
In my opinion people should not quit social media, rather they should quit using smartphones and find out what their friends are up to on a weekly/monthly basis by logging in to their facebook account on a computer. This is a healthy way to use social media.
Let me not get into the obvious rebuttal "but, how do I quit smartphones! they're so useful!". Personally, I use a Nokia 105 and I am very happy.
I do. I check FB a couple times a month, but I have to remember to log out lest they help give power over my actual life to another piece of trash like Trump again. That is the problem with Facebook, and it's a problem they consider to be the family jewels.
This isn't anti-vax nuttiness. While individual people might get value out of FB and communicate with people they wouldn't otherwise and all the other benefits FB provides to the recluse/housebound/gossip demographic that provides value to FB's marketing team (never referring to the demo as such, natch), FB is provably a cancer on society. If you want to say Trump is a special exception, I'm willing to hear how FB no longer is a factor in issues this serious, but I doubt that the rationale exists.
Are you a paid anti-GDPR propagandist? You are somewhat convincing. You almost made me back out of deleting my account but instead I went through with it just now.
> Most of people use Facebook because it is really convenient for contacting other people and organizing events, and that's it.
Well also at the expense off FB mining every little interaction and tidbit of you. Sure Google is doing the same. But might as well control what you can.
I remember this line of argument from the 90s.
Guy: "Actually, Windows is not that bad, and enterprises love its administration features...."
Hivemind: "MICRO$OFT SHILL! BURN THE HERETIC!"
That breaks the site rule against insinuating astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Please don't do that on HN—it's one of the most toxic tropes around.
I like fb. Messenger is useful because almost everyone I know uses it. Seeing events of venues and making them directly, getting updates from the host is very convenient. I like getting into political discussions.
But I've never felt the need to look at the horrible FB wall all the time. I never felt compelled to go to FB all the time.
I also went through the settings and set my privacy settings as I wanted them, long before any of the FB scares happened.
I think Facebook is a tool and if you become addicted, then yes, you should probably quit. But otherwise, use it in a way that helps you.
I think instead of scaring people about privacy you have to first understand and appreciate the value people get out of Facebook. For me, it's that I can quickly "feel" connected to and get validation from my friends and community.
Trying to scare people into giving up something they enjoy doesn't usually work. Instead, we should be helping people realize how they can build connection outside of Facebook.
For me, I just gave up on the "did you see on Facebook" conversations with my friends, but not everyone is willing to just abandon a category of shared experiences with friends.
The day will come when we see Facebook as a net negative, but I think it's a long way off unfortunately. The number of people leaving Facebook has to increase to a critical mass where "did you see on Facebook" conversations become un-cool.
Rhetorical questions probably. Because Facebook has reduced all that friction. Being connected and getting validation gives you that same dopamine hit you get from connecting with someone in person...multiple times over.. and you can do it from your smartphone
I hate having to contact a dozen people individually to organize an event. It's even harder to do when it's impromptu and details may change quickly. It's not rare that we may organize a party a few day earlier and it would be clearly impossible to gather people opinions that quickly without a single tool. I remember once on a Friday I was bored with a friend and we decided to organize a small gathering between friends, we didn't even had somewhere to do it at that point, we just invited a bunch of people, at the end we were about 8 that was able to do it, one of them could host it at his house and that was it. A party that was organized in a few hours.
Facebook doesn't seems a negative for me.
In any case, I'm just not sure why people go on and on about deleting these sites. Those who are concerned aren't that active (if they use it at all). Posting on Hacker News is preaching to the choir. Anyone who's had this discussion with regular Joe's and Jane's knows the dead eye glaze all too well.
If it makes people happy to use Facebook or whatever, we aren't supposed to judge them. We, as the tech community, ARE the problem, and we add to it with every new IOT device, AI invention, and every database we build. It's up to us to take responsibility before being called on it. We are supposed to be the trusted ones, and we can only betray that trust because of the ignorant masses.
Just like people woke up about tobacco use, high-fructose carbonated beverages, and workplace sexual abuse, maybe we're at a cultural inflection point with Facebook.
Facebook will soon require 500 million people to consent to a long list of new terms and conditions to comply with GDPR. There will be no option to decline the new terms, only "accept and continue". What if 5% of users don't accept?
That doesn't sound like much, but that 5% is probably the most media savvy and influential cohort on the platform. 5% defection could be a big deal in continuing the awakening.
What if 25% of the people who remain with Facebook don't feel as good using it any more, and they use it 25% less. That's another 6% of activity and engagement that evaporates, making the platform less "sticky" for everyone.
Just like positive network effects amplified Facebook's importance, negative network effects could cascade into tectonic changes in how people use social media.
No, most people won't delete it completely. Facebook will be with us for many years.
But if I owned Facebook shares, I'd be worried.
What's your argument for that claim?
When it's hard to quit something that you don't like, that thing can easily evolve in ways against you, essentially you've removed the democratic aspect of the thing and you have a dictatorship - facebook.
I think this problem is a little unique to social networking, it feels like it's inevitable that one will prevail above all others because people _want_ to all be on the same platform. If social network is to survive in a healthy way it would seem that a cross network protocol would need to exist to make it easy to switch between them, but that will likely never come from facebook.
I haven't visited Facebook since I removed it from my Firefox start page a couple months ago. I was visiting it out habit but getting so little value that just having to type the URL in is too high a barrier for me to visit now.
Is it worth the effort to log back in and actually delete the account?
Would blocking domains used for Facebook embedded content using the hosts file also work for this purpose?
I would think this would have the advantage of applying to all browsers on ones machine, and not requiring the code to remove the references from the pages on each page load (instead doing stuff when resolving the domains).
Is there a reason this wouldn't work as well?
Still, if you want to bother with the drop-in-the-ocean strategy and block Facebook domains with your hosts file, see:
https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...
You cannot remove it really, only hide it. Facebook itself still has your data.
Didn't someone from the Facebook executive float a paid version of Facebook in an interview recently? I'm not on Facebook but what would be a reasonable price for the services they provide right now, and would anyone pay it?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-a...
Sure you might not have any ads displayed to you, but that's not a privacy concern anyways since Facebook doesn't provide user data directly to advertisers anyways; they just allow them to use a set of filters that rely on your data to help target ads.
Not to mention the latest privacy concerns with Facebook really have nothing to do with advertising, and more to do with their lack of reliable security with your data (ie the Cambridge Analytica data leak, which was done via an app).
The only way I'd truly trust that my data isn't a product in and of itself is if I'm paying for a service from day one, and there are no "free" accounts period.
"These are apps where I volunteer my location, travel, eating, and shopping habits, and I’ve never had the slightest sense that Foursquare was using this data in a way that made my life worse." (c)
They probably have enough vacation and family reporting to not need anymore of that. They are interested in finding trends, so if you are trendy enough and use facebook for trending, feel free to try to take advantage of it and hope you wont miss out.
You can review your ad preferences, including what information is used for FB's ad targeting, here: https://m.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
Since I muted most of my contacts posts and used it like a newsreader, I had to find a newsreader alternative. Feedly is a pretty good replacement so far. And I am thinking of reading a printed daily newspaper again. I feel like on a digital detox path. And I haven't finished my journey yet.
We hear this bromide constantly from people in the #DeleteFacebook movement, but it's facile. It is because it assumes that a "friend" on FB and a friend IRL are equivalent but they're not, and intelligent people know this. There are people in your life that you either want or need to passively keep up with rather than actively socialise or reach.
I've been critical of Facebook's lack of privacy and other issues surrounding the company but I can't get too worked up about the danger of perpetuating passive/active friend distinctions because I think it exists outside of social media and is simply a reflection of the meatspace, and it's actually healthy to do.
> The simple answer is… all the ways we did for the last 100,000 years. Talking to people. Being an active consumer of information and knowledge about your friends’ lives instead of letting it passively wash over you.
That's a nice sentiment and one I absolutely agree with, but there's a big problem with it - how do we do this?
Before the Internet, the answer was obvious; talk to them. That's because friendships tended to be mostly local; you probably knew your friends' addresses and phone numbers.
When the Internet got popular, friendships were made on a global scale, and instant messaging became a thing. A lot of people grew up with AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN. It's important to note that these services weren't provided by companies whose soul reason for existing was to provide communication platforms. They were all secondary platforms provided by companies whose main business was elsewhere.
Now, all of these services are gone. In its place are apps like Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Discord, which would be great, except that WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by the very company you're trying to escape from (Facebook) and Discord is a company whose soul product is their communication platform and thus have the mother of all motivations to make money from your data (even if they don't do that right now, thanks to unsustainable VC funding). Twitter is also a platform owned by a company which has the communication tool as its soul product, and to its credit hasn't made too much controversy in its long tenure, but even though it can be used for direct communication (and is used more for this purpose than Facebook), it's still primarily a "push" platform; for the most part, tweets come to you, as determined by algorithms.
Yes, there do still exist chat platforms provided by companies whose main product isn't their communication platforms: GTalk (or Hangouts) and Skype. Unfortunately these are both owned by companies who have been proven to behave in predatory fashions to their users: Google and Microsoft.
There are free and open-source programs that can be used. Jitsi allows instant messaging and video conferencing via XMPP, for example, Mastadon is a recent Twitter-like platform, and Signal allows for encrypted conversation. Each of these (and others) allow communication with users connected to other servers (and in most cases using other protocols), but even so the problem is that it's unlikely that your friends use programs that communicate over these protocols and are compatible. (The exception is GTalk, which uses XMPP.)
Then there are the numerous decentralised free/open-source methods. Mumble provides text-based and audio-based communication, numerous IRC servers provide text communication, etc. On a wide scale, the biggest issue with these are that you can't communicate with anybody unless they're connected to the same server as you. That might be desirable in the case where you have groups all interested in the same thing or otherwise tied by a common bond, but people can't be expected to join multiple servers just to keep in touch with their friends.
Of course, all of these can be used as primary methods of communication, particularly among small groups of friends, and maybe this is actually what the article is arguing for.
I personally would love if Mastadon became more popular, even though it's a "push"-style system like Twitter, because I think it has the best shot at doing so and it allows communication with potentially your entire circle of friends while simultaneously having differing servers with different policies. It's probably the closest thing to democratic messaging that we have.
Really? My guess is that he wound up on a page with the FB pixel as a result of a Soylent search. Ample was likely running a Lookalike audience ad. It doesn't take any sort of deep knowledge, illegal/immoral data processing, or any other of the nefarious things he is implying to make that connection.
Let's remember that Ample didn't actually ever have this guy's data. An algorithm on Facebook's side said "this guy lives in San Franscisco, has lots of friends in startups, and has searched for articles related to Soylent before" and showed him an ad based on targeting parameters setup by Ample. This is all data that he voluntarily gave to Facebook. Unless he clicked on the ad and then voluntarily entered his personal information into the Ample's site, Ample does not and will never know anything about him, including whether or not he ever was shown their ad.
If you want to avoid this kind of thing, unfortunately deleting Facebook is just the beginning. You'll have to never search the internet (all sites that you click on from any search engine know what you were searching for when you click over), turn off all cookies (which means you can never log in, anywhere), and disable javascript. That doesn't even begin to address the elephant in the room: your ISP knows just about everything you do.
The genie is out of the bottle. Referrers are sent by browsers. The Internet works by first connecting to a network provider, which means they know everything you do. Even in the world of SSL everywhere, DNS queries provide a very telling map of your behavior. Almost all sites rely on cookies at least for login purposes, and those can be used to track your behavior. Just want to disable third party cookies? Go ahead. How long will it be until a service shows up for sites to band together and correlate their first party cookies with info about your IP and achieve the same mission?
So if you're worried enough about your privacy to delete Facebook, then it's hypocritical of you to be reading this message on the Internet at all. You should not be accessing the Internet if you do not want to be tracked.
I’ve been actively filtering any ad not coming from a network where I had a good knowledge and detailed access over my profile (Google and Facebook); filtering any cookie not justified by my direct usage, and it hasn’t really hampered my usage. I can’t read things on Forbes and Business Insider, but that’s hardly a loss.
It doesn’t mean my information doesn’t get leaked, but it means that, starting next month (I’m in the EU) if I see an advertiser in my Spam box, or on https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ I will be able to ask how they got around our agreements and not be given evasive answers.
The GDPR experts I have spoken to have said that if we don't block EU traffic, as a US entity, we should simply have an LLC setup that actually owns each site we run, and have those LLCs pay 100% of their profits as a license fee to a different LLC for its content and domain. The LLC that technically operates the website can then be fined to death and the website will still exist with no actual lost revenue. There are even more effective shell games that can be played in other countries, and there many countries where no such games have to be played because they will simply not enforce EU judgments for fines under the GDPR.
At this point, we've just decided to block EU traffic entirely, but others will likely just proceed as normal and not worry about these heavy-handed regulations, knowing that it is unlikely that penalties can ever actually be enforced against them.
I think courts have ways around it if it is that clear cut : )
> There are even more effective shell games that can be played in other countries,
It seems even the Irish sandwich is failing now.
I'm no expert but my understanding is we have reason to be somewhat optimistic in this case.
You'd be amazed at how difficult it is to pierce the corporate veil in the most popular states for LLCs and corporations (Nevada, Delaware, etc.).
When people were calling my phone in the name of a company, it’s often very ham-fisted and counter-productive for the brand; typically, they would have stale info like the name of the occupant from more than a decade prior. I generally push to ask how they got my number and if they actually work directly for them. So far, they never actually answer that one.
Then, I search for the name of their Chief Marketing Officers on LinkedIn and write tho explain how I got such a bad experience. They often respond by saying that they never would cold-call people, especially not with such terrible information, so I detail that I suspect it’s a third party who they pay to bring traffic, or a local store who took the initiative. More often than not, they act on it because they realise the cost for their brand those have. I’ve been able to stop a lot of repetitive calls that way.
I suspect that, if I can add up who is behind my data leaking, I can warn executive at the original company; it’s quite likely that they were not expecting the information to be sold, or re-used so transparently, or even to be confronted with it -- so I expect them to fight it internally, which should be a lot easier to enforce.
Typically, for Google and Facebook Ad network, I don’t even have to do that: both let me black-list advertisers. I can only encourage everyone to do the same if some advertisers are acting suspiciously.
The existence of Facebook Pixel means there was a meeting where someone said we need to track people without them knowing, and everyone in the room nodded
I'm sick of people trashing facebook when they can only wish for the data collection ability of the NSA. Oh, and there's no opt out there.
So because facebook isn't at NSA's level people should'nt trash fb? What an obviously logically fallacious statement. Do you not realize FB is part of the firehose that feeds the NSA et al? It is only one of many firehoses, but don't underestimate the power of the amount of data fb has. Something tells me you know this and are being intellectually dishonest.
Not because it's not a good response to recent events, but because it's like fighting climate change with conserving energy at home; primarily a token gesture that will change little (mainly due to not enough people ever doing it).
If you actually feel strongly about this, do something about it. I have been setting up a Diaspora* pod for my friends (and exploring the similar https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/), have been trying to be active on Minds.com (social media is one place crypto may actually make sense, but the community is tiny and highly toxic as is), supporting the idea of a paid-model for FB, and generally thinking about this. Facebook is a powerful tool that is best used to do these more productive things to help create a viable alternative - leaving Facebook is not going to change anything.
I also own the domain name hnsocial.club , and have been wanting to try and setup a Diaspora/Scuttlebutt pod to try and get the HN community to embrace it so the network effects of a large community being on such a platform are felt. I don't have much time for this (I am a PhD student at Stanford), but if you think this might be a good idea get in touch to collaborate!
I agree that silly measures like turning off electrical items in stand by mode is like trying to loose weight by trimmeng your toe nails (you are technically lighter but not in anyway that matters) but to say the domestic energy reductions is pointless is a cop out to make people feel better about not trying.
It's funny how you don't see second or third order effects coming from this slight change in behaviour.
When I lived in the States 15 years ago Publix (and I guess other stores, or maybe my bank) already sold a list of everything I bought with my debit card to advertising agencies, along with my full name and home address. I would get ads to my house, tailored to what I had bought a few days before, I'd say at least once a week.
There are also hundreds of other companies that sell data besides Facebook.
No one is talking about the companies that _buy_ the data, either. Can't the case be made that that's unethical too, and if they didn't happily buy the data Facebook would have to find another way to make money?
My point us that it's all good to spread the word about questionable practices employed by companies that people use, but do we have to exclusively focus on Facebook forever, like it's the source of all evil and everyone else is a saint, or can we talk about someone else for a change..? Even in this article other companies are mentioned barely to prove the author's point against Facebook.
As for the rest, that just depends on how much you share, and I would argue that other companies (like Google) might know even more than Facebook does.
I've also created Facebook campaigns for clients and there was no way to target cheating husbands, just very broad interests.
I deleted my FB account 6 years ago. 2 years ago I went for an eye test at a local opticians. Yesterday I received a letter from them saying my test was due, even though i've moved since.
For clarity - i'm in the UK and have removed myself from the edited electoral register. So who matched my data and gave my new address to the optician?