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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

How is that not the question? Do you believe Facebook violated their users privacy rights? Do you believe in accountability? Then the question is why not delete facebook?

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.

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If you look beyond just Facebook, these are issues that will continue to crop up no matter what platform you use. The EFF also makes the claim that there are people for whom deleting Facebook is not a viable or tenable option, and maybe they're right, maybe the tools for them to drop Facebook altogether just don't exist. In that case, they should still have an expectation of privacy and data portability.

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.

There is another perspective regarding "deleting FB is not viable option". When you encounter a case in your real life, when you are unable to stop using "something" even if it clearly hurts you, it is typically called addiction. Maybe it ia time that people revise if it is really not a viable choice.

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.

It is cool that your life is so highly social, but mine never was. At times I was extremely socially isolated and Facebook actually did helped a lot. I do have and often had problem finding events, my childhood friends left the town or are busy etc etc.

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.

But there is still the same problem, for you it is the same as it was before, you have a large amount of contacts, same as my phonebook. With age come lots of work, having a family makes it even worse and it is normal, that at the end you are having only a few of them. This is nothing special and observed over decades. But what the FB does is creating a false sense of friendship, and since you don't have much time (and with aging you are having it even less), instead of focusing to a few people you really like, go for a beer with them, actually bond or find another friend, it makes everyone a "phonebook" entry. 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. Same as here but with a twist - FB gives you a false feeling that your social life is ok, while here you know that you only chat with strangers. It encorages you not to do anything to find friends, to bond, instead of helping people bond, it is actually preventing them - which is great for FB business, the more time you spend there, the more they earn. And to make it even worse, due to the FB it is becoming even harder to find frinds, as its users (not all) are off the grid for normal, real life, socializing. Actually you made me think about it: all of my real life friends are very modest in using FB or they don't use it at all. To me it looks like that what people like you are considering as a solution (FB) is actually a problem.

(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)

Your original post comes across as “I’m super cool and popular so I don’t need Facebook. Everyone should just be like me.”

(After I wrote it I have started to think about your answer as rethorical. If this doesn't fit, I would be really satisfied if people who do fit would have a chance to read 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?

I like how you are totally convinced that everyone has tons of free time and no real world duties and responsibilities. And how you see socializing primary as social status thing or that self-imposed-geek-isolation is your only reference for someone who is lonely.

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.

Facebook made my life better, but that does not matter to you, because my life without Facebook would revert back to bad which you are completely cool with. That is the core of your argument.

> 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.

Unfortunately, I didn't made it up and if you surf a bit around psychological studys it is proven fact, if you believe the science, this is just one of researches:

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.

I upvoted you, as a counter-weight. I don't necessarily agree 100% with you, but I think downvotes shouldn't be used to express disagreement - and your comment was a valuable expression of opinion.

Thank you, but everyone should understand that.

my opinion is that you were downvoted cos people really want to use Facebook for whatever reason and when you say they don’t need it they start shaking... so yes, it is an addiction.

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...

If the EFF wants to write an article arguing that privacy violations are widespread, and therefore viable privacy-respecting options aren't available.. then I'm all ears.

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.

EFF is not saying that people should not leave Facebook. It is saying that currently for most of its 2 billion users, leaving Facebook is too difficult, they wont do that and if they did that they would loose too much.

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.

So you are arguing that in the information age the only way to communicate for some people is facebook? why can’t phone, sms or email work?

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...

How does one find old friend's phone numbers or emails, when they want to reconnect, nowadays?

I am much more in your court than you think, yet somehow Facebook has become a way to make and break relationships and/or businesses for people who are not us. I'm not going to pretend to know what all the individual edge cases are spread out across 2 billion people preventing some of them from leaving, but I'm not going to dismiss the notion simply because I don't personally have that problem and I generally expect the people I associate with to not have that kind of problem.

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.

This is just what the revealed preferences of Facebook users suggest. My friend count did not decrease the slightest since the recent Facebook attention. Close to nobody quits.

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.

It's the EFF's mission to ensure that everyone gets privacy, not just those who are connected enough to know which apps they should delete.

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