To Facebook, we are all just so much data. They just don't care. Who doesn't have a personal story or two about Facebook's indifference by now? Just...Delete Facebook. It is time.
We flatter ourselves that just deleting the app will be enough to stop Facebook from tracking us. Their appetite for our data is much too voracious for that.
What you say is only true if you can suppress your addiction for N days without logging in. Deleting a Facebook account takes N days to "process", but everyone knows its just a manipulative policy designed to prevent people from following through with deletion.
For all intents and purposes, when you try to delete your Facebook account, they basically say "Sorry, we won't let you do that until you can prove you won't use it again for N days". Logging in at any time before the Nth day will automatically abort the deletion.
On top of that, there's this practice of differentiating between suspension and deletion going around, which makes proper deletion an intentionally obfuscated task. I remember deleting my Quora account to be a strangely convoluted process.
There needs to be a distinction between "proper deletion" and "not even a deletion". The current account deletion feature is "not even a deletion". I hope one day "not even a deletion" is looked down upon enough to warrant change. Deletion means "proper deletion", it never meant anything else to anyone.
"When the person visiting a website featuring Facebook’s tools is not a registered Facebook user, Facebook does not have information identifying that individual, and it does not create profiles for this individual.
...
We do not create profiles for non-Facebook users, nor do we use browser and app logs for non-Facebook users to show targeted ads from our advertisers to them or otherwise seek to personalize the content they see. However, we may take the opportunity to show a general ad that is unrelated to the attributes of the person or an ad encouraging the non-user to sign up for Facebook."
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/facebook-social-me...
It's conceivable that Facebook could deanonymize users/aggregate the data they get from like buttons etc, but they claim that they don't use that data for ad targeting and it's only used for security.
> We do not create profiles for non-Facebook users
What is a "profile"? Is a shadow profile a profile? Not "creating a profile" may be very different from not tracking someone.
I'm extremely skeptical of that. When I downloaded my Facebook data, there was a "contacts.html" file that contained data scraped from my phone's contact list aggregated with other contact information that I'd never seen before for people I'd never been Facebook friends with. Some people on that list have never had Facebook accounts. While I don't know if they had extra data aggregated into their entry, the fact that their data was scraped from my phone shows Facebook has the data to create a profile for them.
I'm guessing their statements are only true if you read them very narrowly in a misleadingly specific way. For instance, by understanding "profile" to mean a "the Facebook Profile that comes with a Facebook account," rather than a more generic "collection of data about a person."
Maybe you can reach an outsourced rep from India after waiting a few hours.
At Facebook’s scale, it would be very difficult for their employees to care particularly for any individual user, but collectively, it’s not out of the question.