is there something so bad that fb could do that would get you to stop? If so, what is it? Where is your red line?
Or absent an alternative with fb's network effects, will you keep using their products regardless of the unseen costs you rack up?
I don't really care if FB sells my information to advertisers, so they can market products to me more effectively.
I don't care if FB co-operates with other companies in order to suggest friends to me.
FB adds a lot of value to my life (messaging & finding out about events).
What I truly dislike about FB is that it creates information bubbles, so people are never exposed to viewpoints outside of their own. Also FB doesn't regulate false information/alt-right propaganda enough.
Obviously, I would prefer if FB didn't sell my data, but at the end of the day it doesn't impact me at all.
That being said, if I ever become an important figure who is running a business that is competing with Facebook in some way, then I'll be sure not to use their service.
I recall being in my early teens, when I went to create my (first) Facebook account. I mentioned it to my dad. He explicitly told me that whatever I did on Facebook would go to their servers, that whatever reached their servers was theirs, and that they would do whatever they wanted with that data regardless of whether you agreed to it or not. The whole reason I gave up and made an account was because my friends had already given the app their contact list, and the service already had my phone number.
From day one I've treated online services like amoral, dangerous animals, and so far nothing these organizations have done has especially shocked me, though I have been impressed or surprised on occasion. My mantra is generally 'if I or the NSA could imagine it, private industry will attempt it'.
I still get a lot of value out of my Facebook account. Facebook pages are a gateway to niche interest groups, social trends, and the political fringes that would otherwise be inaccessible to outsiders. Seeing the ads Facebook puts in my feed helps me to calibrate my mental model of how I'm being observed, who's sharing data with who, and how online services perceive me (I typically use ad-block, and only occasionally close it to check my ads).
If I want to contact someone I've only met in passing, keep up with family and political bubbles, or do a bit of background investigation, Facebook's there for me.
Accessing the service requires a bit of a faustian bargain. But by the time I joined, the country had already made it on my behalf, so I opted to reap the benefits of that bargain rather than just being social collateral.
Facebook could scare me off the way Google Search did - by sanitizing its content feed to the degree Google's sanitized its search. But I'd still use Messenger, and any other useful service they come up with.
But otherwise it'd have to become obsolete in the same way as MySpace.
Today, I use Facebook because it's useful for connecting with people I just met, long lost friends, and because Messenger is the most convenient messaging app out there. Instagram is a great app that I enjoy using and will continue to use (also anecdotal, but I've never seen an ad in Instagram either. I guess I must not follow enough people?)
Realistically, the only way I stop using FB's services is if they start charging for them. That's my personal red line, just because I'm too lazy to pay and I figure most of my friends will be, too, so they'll just move on to the next big thing.
For current events, I use Searx, Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, and Baidu (if I'm really digging). I don't trust any one provider on politically sensitive topics, and the the order/kinds of the results can occasionally carry as much signal as the the content of them.
I'm not conspiracy mongering, though. I merely think of search algorithms as extensions of the contexts in-which they're designed, and are more likely to represent the interests of their creators than my search for knowledge.
While I'm more than likely to take the papers of record at their words, I've known more than enough police officers, journalists, and armchair philosophers to know that consciously or not, individual biases can color the processing and presentation of information.
Details that may seem obvious or superfluous through one lens may not be to another.
Only by extracting perspectives and datapoints from each source I access, can I confidently say that I have a reasonable understanding of the progression of any given event, as well as the metanarratives surrounding it.
Depending on the topic at hand, omission from one search engine can be as damning as the inclusion of propaganda in another.
The obsession with reputability is why I abandoned Google. In narrowing the array of sources the search engine surfaced in the hopes of protecting the average user from misinformation, it narrowed access to fringe sources of knowledge, which although unreliable can be a goldmine of supplemental information.
Say what you will of Baidu and Yandex, if you know a bit about their nation's leadership and international policies, you can guess their biases and can guess how they'll adjust what you see. That's useful. American companies can be much less predictable.
And yes, you should be afraid of western spooks if you live in a western country. I wouldn't have said that 10 years ago.
“The central television’s family name is the party” - a real actual quote from an actual "media" organization:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/19/xi-jinping-tou...
It feels like a red line ... I'm mulling over various options including just letting it go.
It seems like a bad idea for them since I'm one of the few people I know in my circle of friends that's still active and posting ...
Honest answer: my purchasing/social network data is worth extremely little to me, so I don't care who has it. And I don't have a problem with advertising; I prefer to allocate responsibility to individuals for their own decisions, so if somebody is influenced by an advertisement, if anybody is to be faulted then it's themselves, not the advertisement/advertiser.
In all seriousness, if companies actually had to pay for your data, suddenly their business models would flip and you would find that we would go from being the products to being the customers.