How to Delete Facebook and Instagram from Your Life Forever
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/facebook-activated-my...
I have an interesting follow-up: they have rejected every ID that I have sent them. I took a photo of my passport and sent that to them, and then they rejected it. Same with my drivers license.
I'm left in limbo: I want to delete my Facebook account, but they insist that I first have to send them an ID, and they reject all the IDs I send them. They reject that ID with a form letter, so I'm not clear why exactly the ID is being rejected.
[1]-https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/9ci4qe/lpt_get...
You may be surprised to learn that he wasn't a prince, either.
That's so bizarre, though having dealt with corporate and governmental bureaucracy not too surprising. I wonder if you could go another route and see if you can post something controversial enough for them to close your account but not illegal, so you don't get in real trouble. Sometimes the best way to fight an bureaucracy is using its own irrationality against itself.
It will cost them so much money to simply look at what you’ve filed that they will immediately delete the account because you’re a nuisance. Customer service reps cost a tiny, tiny fraction of the per-hour rate of their legal team, even when you’re dealing with people who are in-house.
If you find deleting those accounts too drastic, I highly recommend simply deleting the apps, and moving to browser-only consumption and browsing those sites in private mode.
It doesn't cut off your social networks, and if you want to check them, you'll have to login every time. Simply having to do that will naturally wean you off the networks, with the huge added benefit of not being tracked all the time!
Maybe things will change when Facebook actually starts monetizing the app.
I feel like Facebook is happy with the status quo, leaving WA ad-free in order to have a persistent backdoor in people’s lives so they can use it to “improve” ads on their other platforms.
WA seems too valuable to burn with ads and stuff.
Burn? They keep cramming Facebook and Instagram with more and more ads and both of those platforms are still going from strength to strength.
I wish ISPs provided a “pest control” button that automatically blocks this kind of vermin at the network level.
Many (most?) ISPs are in the pests group.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/03/30/fcc-p...
I just set one up on Friday. I bought the $75 Raspberry Pi Canakit (has everything you need except a USB mouse and keyboard that you need to temporarily plug into it while you set it up) and had it up and running in less than an hour for my entire house.
It makes a noticeable difference, notably on page load performance especially on my iPhone, which has always had a sorry adblocking situation.
Looking at the stats at http://pi.hole/admin (the internal URL admin page) it's blocked 5,151 requests out of 27,168 (~20%) in just two days.
Next step is to set one up in the cloud as a VPN/DNS server so I can route my outside-of-home traffic through one as well.
First, you can't delete IG from the app, only on the web. But, to log into the web site you need a password, which you probably don't have since you probably signed up with FB Connect. So then you have to go through the "forgotten password" route, log into your email to click a link to actually create a password. Then you can log into the IG web site to delete your account. When you finally do that, you keep seeing these dark patterns to reactivate your account. It took me about half an hour.
It seems to me they've clearly tried to make deleting your IG account technically possible but as difficult as possible for the average user. I'm almost surprised they don't require you to send something by snail mail it's so difficult.
This happened to me at different times on FB and IG, and it was such a drawn-out hassle that I just went the other route, signing in with my own email, saying I forgot password, getting a new one, then deleting accounts that way.
I tested it today, went to facebook and was able to log in. My account still had pictures that I manually deleted prior to deleting my account
Not cool.
Will try again in 31 days..
It's still there and when I logged in it was as if nothing had changed... Take two...
Not everyone. Everyone I knew shunned facebook, laughed at myspace, looked down on youtube, you get the idea. For us, it was so odd that people would use their real identities and put their lives online. I think that period marked the true shift of the internet from a tech oriented population to the "normie" population.
I've never had a facebook, myspace or youtube account and never will.
> Now there are so many attacks on the company politically, technically, and socially that I wonder if Facebook will be able to recover its trust with the community?
There were similar attacks on social media back then too but not as vocal or widespread. Facebook, instagram and whatsapp are still growing so I'm guessing they will be fine.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Though I think facebook ( and the nytimes for that matter ) are toxic useless enterprises that humanity would be better off without, I don't think it or the nytimes are going anywhere anytime soon.
Also, keep in mind that facebook is banned in china and if zuckerberg can get his foot in the door, they may have another decade of significant growth.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-visits-china...
User would be required to signup with their id card ; and in case they screw up, would be hold accountable. It would allow to purge the network from a lot of shady practices, from users as well as advertisers and the organisation itself.
It makes no sens a private company owns the public sphere and the public discourse.
Nice work. I don't know why people are voting you down.
Preferring different methods of communication doesn't make you smarter or a leader. It means you have different preferences, nothing more.
Most people don't use those sites out of educated choice -- they got manipulated into using them and would want to leave if they knew what the sites were doing.
Firstly, your friends are more likely to notice it's a scam because they're still connected to your legitimate account. Second, if this does happen to you and you've deleted your account, you can't report it to Facebook. Reporting this issue to Facebook requires either:
1) You (the victim) report the cloned account from the legit account. Or; 2) One of your friends reports it but they must select the victim from their list of friends.
Can't do either if your account is deleted.
That being said, I followed their process for several clients and Facebook refused to do anything about it.
sometimes I wonder if it would be better for me to actually use Facebook and Instagram MORE, just like everyone else.
For many, it has become the norm in how one shows interest in other people.
Anyway, I tried browser plugins and they're surprisingly effective for me. But I always manage other means to distract myself with, that is ultimately non-productive and unfulfilling.
I clearly have problems. lol.
I've found the best way to fix the non-productive problem is to find something you think is worth your time and also fun. I post a lot online helping people with the college search/admissions process because I enjoy it and it helps people. I probably spent more time with that than others do Facebook, but I don't think it's a problem. HN I would classify as a mix of keeping up with my industry + news + general interest.
To be clear, there are also ways to use Instagram/Facebook healthily, but it's much harder when it's literally made to be unhealthy because it's what the company wants.
I believe that the long-term trend we are starting to see is more people coming back to seeing the Internet as a tool to enhance their lives, not a medium by which to live them. When that trend fully evolves, FB, Instagram, and all social media will either change along with it, or fall away.
It is entirely normal to have friends you aren't super close with but still want in your life. A lot can be reached through iMessage/SMS but a ton of stuff happens on social networks nowadays.
One person not an immediate family member remembered to wish me a happy birthday when it came up. One.
It confirmed a lot about us and how much is informed by blue F company.
I don’t think it’s because people don’t remember you though, I think it’s because Facebook has trained us to let it be our assistant for birthdays. It’s also made you used to having tons of people “remember” you, even though they would have never done so before Facebook. It’s really a lonelyness machine in that regard.
When I left Facebook for a period I didn’t remember birthdays either though. I’ve since added birthdays to my contacts so my Callander app is now responsible for being my birthday assistant instead of Facebook.
I also always send a SMS or call and never congratulate on Facebook, exactly because it’s so shallow.
I am in a similar position, and have no social media. To echo some of your points, when I first left FB there were some events that I missed out on that I would consider high importance to me. At first, I was shocked, I tried to hide it with the "real friends with mail me!" excuse, but I was still "disappointed" (for lack of a better word)
I'm lucky enough where a observant extrovert in my social circle noticed my preferences, and now they email/text me about most events. I try to keep in touch with the rest of my friends over phone, and people i'm not super close with over email. I don't do the best job, but I don't miss FB
I know it’s a chicken and egg situation but I eventually rejoined Facebook to not be the hassle.
I don’t use any of their apps though, and I only check fb a few times a week to see what events are happening, and if someone messages me it’ll have to wait until I’m on the desktop version.
1) I was one of the lucky 1 million who had their token compromised but their account "wasn't accessed".
2) I've had this account since middle school, so there's a lot of interactions there that are at best use a lot of txtspeak and at worst are a reflection of values I no longer hold.
3) Most of my family is on FB, and a lot of my communications with my friends are at least partly reliant on the existence of FB.
I made the decision to pull all my data as this author suggested, and try to systematically remove content that was outdated or just looked bad, regardless of whatever content filter I had applied to it. In effect, this breach ruined my trust in the individual filtering that I had applied in the past for a number of my posts.
With that said, removing posts one by one is a HUGE pain because it forces you through a "Are you sure" dialog for EVERY POST YOU WANT TO DELETE. Comments were less evil- there was no dialog but I would have vastly preferred a "checkbox then delete" type of experience- bonus points if they let you check off by month to trim down on clicking.
I intended this to be a weekend project and I've already realized this "audit" is going to take much more time than I intended.
So here's a solution:
Change your Facebook password to something you will not remember, like a random sequence of 20 characters. Copy this string. Click "delete Facebook". Paste the string when it prompts for your pw. Now copy something else, overwriting your clipboard. If you use an advanced clipboard system manually delete all clipboard items. Reboot your computer.
Now you won't be able to log in even if you want to, and Facebook will be safely gone from your life in thirty days.
I should say it's not a complete solution, just another line of defense against the urge to log back in.
If that's still the case, it's understandably a hard sell for users who prefer a laptop/desktop-based interface.
It's also unclear how well something like Signal would replicate the social network aspects of FB/IG. Are group chat facilities good enough?
Is the desktop client a "first class" one? Can I use it exclusively, including for initial signup?
A sibling comment implies the answer is "no", but it's ambiguous, since "linking" could just mean the SMS validation, which, IIUC, need not actually match the phone number on the device [1].
[1] presumably a tablet would work and does not necessarily even have an associated phone number, but that's still not a desktop.
Wire also syncs conversations across devices, unlike Signal that's tied to one device (a phone).
You can have multiple accounts on Wire, just like you would use multiple email addresses, each one for different purposes.
Wire is still way behind Telegram on UX, but is a good option for those who don't want to use a phone number or give their phone number to some centralized service. You set usernames and can @mention them (a recent addition to the client — I'm mentioning this as an example to indicate how far behind it is from Telegram, which had this a long time ago).
Lastly, Wire also allows you to backup your chats and restore them on another device. Signal explicitly blocks this from being done.
Part of the appeal of Signal is that it's supported by a well-endowed non-profit.
Having seen may messaging services come and go, I wouldn't in the least bit be surprised if either of these disappeared in a decade or a decade and a half from now.
> Signal's funding is only a recent event, and one could ask how long that would last too, since Signal doesn't even have a paid service.
Recency doesn't make a difference for users considering joining it now (only for why they may not have joined previously). $50M should be plenty to run a service for, say, 10 years, assuming they don't hire a huge number of employees.
As Wikimedia has demonstrated, a paid service isn't required to survive long-term. Certainly, users (and maybe companies) would be willing to donate to a non-profit foundation, whereas doing so to a for-profit company like Wire seems implausible.
Especially in the context of the OP article, the source of the funding of the app and service is pertty important, as it informs the motives, and for-profit motives generally seem to have been, historically, not in the best interests of the users.
After rationalising our card list to the 5 to 10 people we are actually friends with, Christmas is a lot more calm. I'm sure some of the people we used to send cards to are a lot happier too, as they now no longer feel obligated to send us cards in return.\
I suppose my point is that in my experience most people only have 10 to 20 people (if that) they would consider friends. It's only since Facebook and the like that we have considered great numbers of followers our "friends".
Maybe start a group blog or private forum or something and try to let folks know they can find you there, but you're phasing out participation from FB?
Not to mention I feel an actual connection with them when I’m talking to them over the phone. I never once felt a real connection with them or anyone else by their Facebook wall or Twitter feed.
Recently i was traveling in some part of the world and remembered that an old friend might be living there. I then found out he erased his facebook account. And so I ended up not being able to reach out to him. It's really hard nowadays to keep in touch with international friends without Facebook.
Facebook allowed me to be comfortable in not contacting the people who I cared about. All I had to do was "like" a post, or very rarely comment. Hell, I didn't even have to do that. I knew they were doing well.
However the truth of it was that I was not really engaging with them, I was mostly checking their pages sporadically and not actually talking to them. As it turned out they were not doing so well but were curating their social media persona so that extended family would not worry. The knock-on effect obviously being that I was unable to help them and because I was lulled into a false sense of connection I believed I felt that I didn't need to directly 1-to-1 engage with my friend.
This is anecdotal, sure, but after talking with others they also share the feeling of "connection" but lacking depth, and intimacy. It's just enough to make you numb to the desire to chase it.
I've deleted facebook now. I am a stoic and independent independent person but it has forced my hand more to reach out to family and friends. Now; I definitely have a better relationship with my Mother for example.
Anyway one important point is that you won't "keep in touch with your friends and family" the way you do now; that's called "being on Facebook." By insisting that things always be exactly as they are now, you get yourself stuck in a rut.
I believe you're already familiar with all the different ways of keeping in touch with someone. Tell them you're leaving Facebook, get their contact info, and leave. I keep in touch primarily through email and text (either of which can include photos or other attachments), and very infrequent voice calls. I have fewer relationships, of higher quality. Not everybody is a special unique snowflake who deserves my attention. Nor am I so special that they need my validation. The entity that sold everybody on that whole idea is Facebook, the one that wants to own the channel of communication. Use a different channel, and the problem is solved.
Voice/Video connections. Start with all the free or low-cost VOIP solutions to do voice and video calls. Skype is great for a lot of interpersonal stuff, and can do conference video easy.
Email - that's what I primarily use with my family, including both parents as long as they lived. None of my family has ever been on FB.
Text/Mobile. Works great, its more direct, and if the conversation gets thicker, you can just ring & use voice.
Post -- send physical letters and objects! all kinds of fun, even tho it isn't instant...
If you really need a central place to post images, just get a website of your own, there's dozens of hosting providers, or use some other photo sharing service.
Seriously, there is zero reason to actually use FB. It is toxic, just dump it.
(And if the above makes me seem old, I'm young-ish: 28.)
So so true. I wish more people realized this.
Liking a post isn't "keeping up". It is you being aware of their actions. But that doesn't count as keeping up. Keeping up requires the emotional connection, like what you have with friends and family. Liking or seeing posts doesn't make this emotional connection grow, but it makes you think it is.
That being said, I've found that catching up with people I haven't seen in awhile is actually nicer without facebook. You end up having more to talk about. They will tell you about their events in the recent time. There is the emotional response with this too.
The other thing is that you can still be friends with someone you haven't seen in a year. I think the only thing Facebook accomplishes in this respect is making it feel more difficult to reconnect with someone (because "you're already connected").
I'm carefully optimistic that at some point we'll get a IG alternative based on something like ActivityPub with different clients to connect to. One can always dream.
That’s the problem that most new social networks have. I’m not using Mastodon because there’s no good looking iOS app. If Tweetbot would ship an app that works with Mastodon I would probably use it. Back when App.net was around some famous Twitter apps did just that but I think they got burned because it never took off and now nobody is doing it again until it’s more established.
https://pixelfed.social/register is returnins a 403 for me and the Support/Help page appears blank.
Flickr acquired by Smugmug, by the way - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16888876
There also aren’t ads or tracking.
Without the "amazing journey" of course.
I have a facebook account - I haven't posted there in 5-6 years. What data are they going to harvest from me that would be at all useful or relevant? I guess they can find the fake email address I signed up with 15 years ago if that's useful for them.
WhatsApp is much worse. Here in Europe we use it like TOO MUCH. We just can't switch to Signal, we need it to text/chat friends, people we don't know yet, businesses, etc.
Here in the UK I never ever saw a legitimate business advertising a WhatsApp contact number.
> We just can't switch to Signal, we need it to text/chat friends
Doesn't SMS (or iMessage) work? Especially in Europe where unlimited SMS plans are commonplace.
Also SMS doesn’t do group messenging very well.
iMessage would be a great alternative to WA were it cross platform. In EU especially, you’re bound to have a critical mass of your contacts on Android :/
Texts are fine, but as I said above, there're good reasons to not use SMS:
> (1) 0 encryption (2) ISP's full control (3) Doesn't support videocalls (4) Doesn't support neither complex files nor previewing files (5) Doesn't support groups (6) Doesn't support voice messages (7) There're plans which don't include texts so they're not always free
And as I mentioned earlier, here in Spain if you don't have WhatsApp you're literally isolated. I end up using WhatsApp + iMessage but I just.. can't quit WhatsApp.
To sum up, I think it's much harder to ditch WhatsApp than Facebook itself and WhatsApp is too much power for a single company, that's my point :)
While I’ve no doubts that people at FB are actively thinking about ways to monetize it, right now the product doesn’t seem to contain any of the toxic crap from IG/FB (ie: algorithmic timelines, attention-grabing dark patterns, promoted content, etc).
I’m wondering if it’s somehow already there and I simply haven’t noticed :(
I simply don't trust Facebook. I know WhatsApp doesn't contain any of that "toxic crap" (yet), I know WhatsApp is e2e encrypted and as a developer I really know what it does mean, but it's just too much power for a single company..
So at the end of the day there're good reasons to not use SMS:
(1) 0 encryption (2) ISP's full control (3) Doesn't support videocalls (4) Doesn't support neither complex files nor previewing files (5) Doesn't support groups (6) Doesn't support voice messages (7) There're plans which don't include texts so they're not always free
The only apps I use here are WhatsApp and iMessage and I'd love to ditch WhatsApp in favour of signal but I can't.
And once in, you will be forced to either leave and offend people, or stay and bear the consequences.
I wish I could remove it, but as you say, everyone depends on it.