To Delete Facebook or Not to Delete Facebook? That Is Not the Question
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eff.org
They have to text you the details outside of Facebook, or alternatively, have to adopt a new platform because of you.
Of course I still think you should delete Facebook. With all this recent controversy they had a chance to right the wrong, instead they chose to double down on exploiting their user base - not only in the legal department but also by quickly running their facial recognition stuff before the GDPR goes into effect.
On the plus side, the more people leave, the less Facebook will lose its justification because right now, the sole reason to be on Facebook is that it’s where everyone is.
Probably more significant is the impact of not being able to make new friends in the same way. The communities that surround my hobbies seem to be concentrated on facebook. When I make new friends at the face-to-face events the friendship doesn't transition to anything more significant because there's no followup connection on social media. This seems to be one of the modern ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind". It seems to me that other newcomers join the group IRL and on social media and are quickly integrated, but I'm just some guy that occasionally shows up.
My wife, on the other hand, lives for this stuff. She is much, much closer emotionally to people she went through earlier stages of life with and she routinely moans and shrieks about the things I mentioned above. And this suits here needs, because she cares about that sort of information.
That said, even if we grant Facebook a monopoly on 'keeping up with old friends', every other 'social vertical' that currently relies upon Facebook for connection, networking, and event planning represents a startup opportunity with massive market potential. Big one: mommy groups.
I don't have Facebook and I have no issues making friends-because I get up and go out and talk to people. Sure they may not invite me to X events-but when I see them we talk, we have a good time, and we go on with our lives.
> meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured.
I think part of this is "they're just not that into you." Not in a relationship sense-they think you are a fine person. But people have family, work, other, older friends. The vast majority of "social network connections" went just as far for me as some of my in person encounters-that is, went nowhere. But a few did. People don't have the time to be friends with everyone so they simply outsource it to facebook. Sometimes they do things that are interesting and a friendship grows from it-most times, not, in my experience.
I don’t think that this phenomenon is attributable to Facebook. I.e., Facebook doesn’t necessarily steer you toward meaningful interactions, and even without Facebook you can nurture a friendship using SMS, email, and so on. Developing friendships takes more effort than a typical Facebook interaction allows (“liking” a pic of someone’s food or whatnot).
[1] Granted, this may be age group specific. My friends tend to be 30-40-somethings, or late 20s at the youngest. Not so surprising, given I'm in my early 40s.
It's not optimal, but as others said, getting out completely can make you a bit of a hassle to others.
Could someone explain what this means? Is Facebook’s facial recognition illegal under GDPR?
1) Find out through Facebook as if I'm friended to "the right people" like it's 1987 [my "usual network" would never have heard of these people, not even a little bit]
2) Find out through an acquaintance live and in person by them randomly inviting me simply because I was around the right place at the right time like it's 1987
I'm not on Facebook, even if I was it's still 1987. Perhaps this is "the discovery problem", but even so in "current year" it still exists if only in ever-smaller measures. Choose your intensity of flavour, I guess.
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?"
The problem are apps that notifies us about useless or non direct communication stuff.
I turned of notifications because they were too distracting, and that only made things better. I still chat with my friends, but I do so only when I pick up my phone voluntarily.
People get also use to the fact that they don’t get an immediate reply when they write you, and they stop expecting it. Interactions are more relaxed.
In my experience, it has been neither. My friends effortlessly filter what I need to hear into iMessages, e-mails, phone calls and face-to-face shares.
Human communication is as easy to hack as it is fluid and resilient.
I check FB messenger stuff from my browser.
FB also works well on the phone's browser- so that's another way to go. But somewhere along the way they quit letting you use Messenger in the phone browser. That was the sniff-test failure that let me know Messenger is probably not good for me. FB wants it too much.
So I deleted Messenger from my devices. I haven’t missed it at all in a year.
If I didn't have friends in other countries I'd just be using Facebook Messenger and iMessage as well. In the US it's predominantly Facebook Messenger.
Neither my dad nor my mom use it, nor the rest of my family. I've never used it. I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only one so thoroughly insulated from Facebook addiction.
Whenever it comes up in conversation I get a lot of people who reply with "I wish I could stop using Facebook", or "wow, you're lucky".
I had the Facebook app for a brief period when it was first released and decided that it was poison. So I'm maybe not as thoroughly insulated as you, but it sounds odd to hear everyone talking about how much of a necessity Facebook is for them.
I feel like Messenger is fine since it’s not a facebook exclusive feature (instant messenging).
This is different than saying that Facebook is a failure. As a business, they're obviously tremendously successful.
Data is not the one thing stopping people leaving facebook... friends are.
This force stopping people leaving is the same one that drove social media into a monopoly - there is no cross platform protocol. Platforms do not communicate with each other like email clients. In this scenario the very nature of communication encourages people gather into a single large group for convenience (if it wasn't facebook it would have been another).
The abuse of a company in such a position is inevitable.
The _question_ is not going to be how can we make a protocol now (it's too late, facebook doesn't care), the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an issue.
There are some other options:
- Phone makers create a "message center", a central place where emails and feeds are shown. Facebook must now adhere to these standards, and they lose their "gatekeeper" position.
- Someone develops an API to interact with facebook on behalf of a user. This API performs a live export of friends, feeds, etc, so that other applications can use them. After a while, people will use those applications instead of facebook itself, and are ready to leave facebook.
Why is everyone so happy to be with one company? Why are they happy to allow one company to manage their social connections and notifications for life?
Social connection technology shouldn't be tethered to one company, everyone huddled under its "protective" wing. That is typical early 21st century thinking. It's eco-system lock-in mentality, which works against users in the end.
I heard a journalist recently call Facebook the "modern day telephone" (Leigh Sales, ABC), which is a stupid thing to say. Facebook is not the technology, it's a service that uses modern technologies.
Imagine if there was only one phone company or ISP everyone in the world used. Not a great scenario for competition, innovation, safety, privacy and open standards evolution. We need those new protocols and ways to connect by easily talking between social media platforms.
That would be really nice, but before that happens a major cultural shift would have to take place and I can't see that on the horizon anywhere. Until then, the only language those companies understand is losing users, or not gaining them in the first place. And that's only the part where we consciously decide whether we're users or not. It still doesn't touch the part where our data is grabbed beyond our influence.
Or being broken up. This is a classic case of market failure. Waiting for users or advertisers to force a change is futile, and not their faults.
I was participating this year in a big street protest calling for police to keep investigating the prime minister for corruption.
The pressure lead to public exposure and accelerated investigation immediately.
Now personally, I think people fool themselves most of the time to find what seems to be a reasonable answer to why they use Facebook: be it networking, be it a way to communicate with family and friends, be it a way to stay "in touch" with the news (and that also opens up for the whole fake news discussion, but oh well). I'm not saying those are not legitimate reasons to have a Facebook account (these are actually the primary services that it claims to offer), but I really wish people could see that there are other means to that. Some don't even involve having any social media accounts.
If you hold facebook accountable, then you send a message: users DO value privacy, and any platform that abuses the privilege may find themselves with far fewer users and a less profitable product. Don't hold them accountable, and you'll get a sorry note from Zuckerberg, and he'll violate it later when you aren't looking.
In fact, this article raises another question: how much does the EFF value privacy? Apparently violators just need to say "I'm sorry" and continue what they were doing, and the EFF will argue on their behalf that the benefits of their service outweigh the cost of your lost privacy.
Facebook's practices are a societal problem, but theirs aren't the only ones, and services that have the same exact problems are probably being developed right now or will be developed within the next few years.
So my takeaway from this, reading the EFF's post is 1. we should be looking beyond hashtag campaigns targeted at one specific corporation and 2. if for whatever reason #DeleteFacebook is not a viable option, then you should still have your privacy protected and 3. the subtext to point two reads to me as: if you can #DeleteFacebook, you should, but we're not in the business of telling you what services to use wink wink nudge nudge.
Let me give you my example, I am not a FB user. Never was. Do I have problem finding events? Do I have less real friends? Is my quality of life any worse becoase of that? I have hard time going to all events that interest me, I am forced to prioritise meeting my real friends due to lack of time, I still chat with them using email, sms, phone, messanging. I dont see anything that FB could change here to better, only to worse, by alienating those real life friendships that I am having now (by adding endless noise of social network - I am having over 400 phone numbers in my phone, I don't want to get all the possible news about their life, it is impossible to handle).
Social networks don't help you having real friends, for those you need to keep feal life contacts, they help you to loose them, by giving you fake feeling that you have "bytefriends" and dispersing your attention from those you care the most to buch of insignificant acquaintances.
I cant feasibly go to events and prioritizing real life meetings/parties without prioritizing away job, my kids and learning of new stuff.
Not everyone is like you. Not everyone has tons of free time when he can move anywhere freely, not everyone makes friends super easily and have large amount of acquaintances wherever he goes. And not everyone has tons of people around who happen to share similar interests or personalities. It was like that during college, but as I grown older it was increasingly less so. And I guess I am not alone, because this forum has highly upvoted "it is hard to make friends or not be lonely" article highly upvoted approximately once a month.
To me, Facebook did a lot of service that I could not replace by phone or message.
(I was downvoted, I seriously don't understand why, it would be great if people who are doing it would rather write what is so wrong, I am seriously having issues understanding it)
It is not about popularity, you can always find people that have something in common with you. You found them on FB, right? Just don't use FB for excuse for not even try and you will find out that you don't need it. I am a geek as you (probably) are, but there are a lot of other geeks too. If we would live in a same city, what is stopping us to go for a beer and play board games (which I love) and laughing at people who don't have a clue what we are doing. Screw the "how you look" prejustice (which FB is actually imposing - before FB came out, people cared much less about the look, this whole "lets be preaty" and "how interesting life I have"(which is a lie in most of cases) mania is by large its fault). The point of bonding is to interact in person, not hide behind a chat. And after a while (of hiding) you are completely spaced out in regard of social interaction. As far as I am concerned, todays pop culture is completely f* up and something to laugh at, why taking THEIR social norms on yourself? You can be popular too, due to your math knowlidge (yeah, stereotypes, I know), board games, whatever. Just find right group and BOND. In real life, stop poking your nose with rubber gloves, take them off and expirience the REAL expirience ;)
Come on, I bet there was a guy (and girl, they are faking their interests to be """popular""", wait until they are 30+, you will see a huge change in their behaviour) in your class, in your neibhourhood, who has similar interests as you do, just say fuc* off, to anxiety, to media, to pop oriented morons (I am sorry, but I really despise this part of culture, which is faking their natural behaviour just to fit... somewhere) and bond with people, what do you have to loose - except of years of training of social interactions that FB is taking away from you?
And like how there could not be no reason in for girls to change behavior when their life situation changes then that they were "faking". Makes me really not want to be in real-world group of geeks with you. That sort of bullshit is why I am avoiding local tech meetups.
> But what the FB does is creating a false sense of friendship,
That is something you made up. You
>, instead of focusing to a few people you really like,
I am focusing on poeple I really like and Facebook made it easier for me to do so.
> go for a beer with them, actually bond or find another friend,
That assumes many free evenings and physical proximity with similar people. That assumes that going regularly for beer as an easily available option that does not costs other things that are important - work time, children time and other duties time.
> At the end you finish with not having a single real friend in your live, but you rather spend a lot of time on chatting with irelevant people.
That is life. That is also infinitely better then being alone. Having close friends physically present around me with a lot of time on both sides might be even better, but that is not here not there. You ignore the actual choice "shallow or nothing at all" and talk about made up choice "shallow or best friend".
I guess that you have zero idea what it is like to be socially isolated. That is happy for you, but people unlike you exist. Your response to them is just a bunch of condescension.
> FB gives you a false feeling that your social life is ok, while here you know that you only chat with strangers.
Again, you made that up. You dont know what feeling I or other people have, so you project cluelessness into them. People are not off the grid because of Facebook, people were off the grid all the time. Both those with and without Facebook, due to how life is lived.
That is why it became successful in the first place, too many people found what it provides helpful.
I did not downvoted you, but I guess it happened because you built your argument of projecting worst possible motivation on people who are not like you.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Yeah I believe it is really helpful for a very narrow group, let me compare it to hearing aid, people that have hearing disabilities, are having a life much better in using hearing aid devices, while it will impair hearing of anyone hearing well. To paraphrase it, what people are doing today is using hearing aid as they are too lazy to listen (To avoid confusion: I am talking in general! The majority of gaussian bell curve!) and this is turning society into bunch of half deaf people. I am sometimes having problem with, people not understanding that, socialization is a very basic skill that has to be learned and trained.
FB is like junk food, it tastes well, it is simple to obtain, it doesn't need a lot of effort to cook, but in general it harms you. And due to the fact that most of people don't care, population is getting fat, it suffer from bunch of cardiovascular diseases, but getting healthy food is progressively harder and expensier. As most of people are not using it. I don't think anyone needs to be rocket scientist to understand that.
I don't have problems if downvotes someone who actually takes part in debate :) but drive by shooting annoys me a lot.
and also, i see internet as public space, YOU are responsible what you leave behind, if someone comes up to you in a real world and ask you your birthday how would you react? yet you do it on the internet and people will give that and their CC card number without problems and then complain... So, yeah this is not just Facebook fault...
Here's what the EFF says about Facebook: "Deleting Facebook is not a choice that most of its 2 billion users can feasibly make. ... Without viable general alternatives, Facebook’s massive user base and associated network effects mean that the costs of leaving it may not outweigh the benefits."
Imagine that, a service a little over a decade old is now a dependency for life. It's not "feasible" to leave. Apparently privacy violations must be weighed against the size of the user base and network effects.
Last I checked, phones still worked. Messaging still worked. All of the solution that existed a decade ago are still there. You CAN leave.
I look forward to the EFF proposing a legal solution to privacy such as GDPR in the US. They haven't done that, and in the meantime, there should be consequences for Facebook. The EFF shouldn't be arguing for the lack of consequences for this specific privacy violation, without proposing a solution to the problem across the industry.
Your argument is phone and messaging which does not replaces Facebook for most of those people. Phone being completely irrelevant. Just because those people are not exactly like you, dont have same needs, same usage patterns and similar social groups around them as you have, does not mean they don't exist. Nor it means that EFF should not use them as an argument.
on the othe hand, how hard is to tap someones land phone and listen in to their conversations, yet people still used it a lot before so i think expectations of privacy in public space is just a fantasy... If you really cares about privacy you wouls not use facebook, and you would look for encrypted communication channels, most people don’t care however...
There absolutely should be consequences for Facebook specifically, I vehemently agree with you! I don't think even the EFF is saying there shouldn't be, just that it is not part of their mission to advocate one way or another on that matter. That said, I think, and I think what the EFF is saying here, is that it is unproductive to contain the conversation solely to Facebook. Facebook is the problem right now, and probably not the only one, and definitely not the last one to be developed with that business model. Whatever services we use, there needs to be a baseline for what we should be able to expect in terms of privacy and data portability, a baseline that favors the users of the platform.
Personally, I think #DeleteFacebook does matter, and I think people honestly should, but now is the time to be thinking about the long term. GDPR-like laws are one possibility, and as a society we should be figuring out if we want to go that route, or a different route altogether.
The article channels the concern with Facebook away from the specific brand and towards the universal problem that emerges in our current digital economy. Which I think is vastly more productive.
Has anyone looked into the data that Facebook provide, to see what potential apps/services could be built on it? It seems really ripe for exploitation, to me .. but I have yet to download the .zip and inspect its contents. Off to do that now...
I would say that as a person who understands technology and the ramifications of facebook, you have a moral duty to not use it. And you have a duty of educating people about facebook.
You can't stop it alone (no single person can - even shooting Zuck would probably not stop facebook) but you can stop voting for it, just like you probably aren't voting for alt right/nazi parties in your local elections.
The problems that Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal highlight—sweeping data collection, indiscriminate sharing of that data, and manipulative advertising
That's what the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved
In order for them to achieve either of those goals, they have to increase time spent on site and engagement, in order to maximize ad revenue. That results in them serving content the user wants to see at all costs. Besides the fact that content a user wants to see may not be the best for the user, and can simply waste time, this can also mean a massive echo chamber reaffirming peoples’ own beliefs. While it may serve to connect them with their like-minded peers, it emotionally and intellectually results in disconnecting them from the rest of society. This results in a dangerous shift in factionism and idealogical siloing.
So the negative effects of simply serving what the user wants to see at a primitive level is fundamentally tied to an advertising business model. This makes it probably impossible for facebook to positively incentivize users without fundamentally changing their own incentive structures.
You may think there’s nothing wrong if facebook is merely delivering what users want, but facebook uses manipulation to only deliver what users want in the short term for immediate gratification. It’s similar to addictive drugs and cocaine. People’s long term thinking know it’s bad for them even thhough their short term brain wants it now.
Therefore if anyone is to create a facebook killer, all they have to do is provide a social platform that has a business model that is both sustainable and not reliant on short term engagement and selling ads. Instead it should focus on ceding control of social interaction to the user, rather than it being the byoroduct of manipulative user experience. It should tie its own success to ensbling users to achieve their own long term social goals. Since it would be the antithesis of facebook, they’d have too much inertia in their ad model to effectively clone it. Any other social platform can simply be cloned by facebook.
Facebook has web interface. Uninstall the app from phone, and login once a week to check messages and to plan events.
He removed it from his phone (but still using the messenger app).
For surveillance you can say same for Google and their analytics code installed everywhere.
For democracy, i ap pretty sure same tactics are used in any media channel...
Facebook's uniqueness, in reach, magnitude of damage, and negligence, has been qualitatively demonstrated, by its actions and employees' defenses of said actions, over the past months.
The data leak was just the trigger to take the jump.
Facebook will never build this API, but perhaps someone can use DOM traversing as the underlying mechanism for an open source service that provides the API.
Perhaps, with the actual attention of the medias, it’s the right time to make a point, whatever it is.
Taking away these facilities would be a giant step backwards, like removing telephone lines or postal routes. It's really a matter of defining who has the authority of this position and how the information is distributed, where Facebook is problematic.
(I guess that’s why FB acquired it for 19bn)
I log in most days, but all I do is ack my friends. When I put something on, it's some BS that lets them ack me. I don't think it takes me more than a few seconds to scroll through and hit like.
Next to that there's the occasional "I'm in town" which is a call for a face-to-face.
Firstly, it speaks of how ignorant we all are, as a public mass, of how the world actually works, even the reality of an "obvious" situation we aspire to be commenting about. Because you cannot actually "delete facebook". Neither can you "delete" the entire service as if it is some "app" on your phone, or old-skool word document on your laptop, nor can you delete the data it knows about you. Even if FB actually deleted the data they had about you, you can't make their AI's "unlearn" everything they got from you, and you can't make their 3rd-parties delete your data as well ( no matter what you well-intentioned t&cs-ninnies might say to counter this, I just don't believe you that there's anyway to make these things happen ). So you can't Delete Facebook. The first rule of Facebook is: Facebook is eternal.
Secondly, even if you go ahead and delete your account, your protest is impotent. Your victory is symbolic. Your effort at self determination will be undone. Because it's sort of like people saying they were going to leave California ( or the US ) if Trump got elected. So you can do it, but it won't change anything. It will probably end up severely disrupting / hurting your life. And in the end, you most likely won't do it. What this reveals about our ignorance is how powerless we actually are, and how ignorant we are of what Facebook has become. It has become a utility. It is ( mostly ) essential. Even if you do not use it, other services assume you do, and your access to those is gatekept by your ( non-existant ) FB account. And if you do use it, or use Messenger, or Whatsapp, then it is a good way to stay in touch with people you know. And if you really use it then of course you know why you need it. Second rule of Facebook is: Facebook is necessary.
So the third thing I like about this is, how ignorant this hash tag reveals us to be with regard to the way to deal with Facebook. It's not about individual actions. It's about the collective. FB has begun to impinge upon the collective. It has become a utility. And it exists forever, despite the actions of individuals. When it goes rabid / stray, what is needed is collective actions to bring it back under control of the commons. Within the bounds of the common good. Only regulation can subdue Facebook to the useful and the good. Not protest. The third rule of Facebook is: It's a utility, stupid. Regulate it.
But also, can't we say, if you start allowing FB to grow and operated un regulated what's to stop pretty much anything on the internet to do the same?
Hmm. What to do?
But! Facebook has some really useful features.
I used to engage quite a lot with the social features of Facebook, but now I only use it for a few of things: 1. Facebook Marketplace has now become more useful than Gumtree which used to dominate the local secondhand goods market; 2. Events; 3. Facebook Messenger.
I couldn't give a flip about reading anyone's opinion, posting my own, or looking at your photos.
But what I don't get is, the elephant in the room: why haven't the FBI raided Facebook HQ and seized control of all their data centres: it should obvious to everyone that minors have used Messenger to share lewd pictures and videos with each other, and we all now know that Facebook doesn't actually delete anything because they let download all your data and that data includes pictures and videos you've "removed / delete", and even ones you took with the Messenger app but didn't send!
Zuckerberg is literally sitting on a mountain of child porn!