Brian Acton Tells Students to Delete Their FB Profiles

There is no privacy there. People need to understand, ANYTHING you use on the internet opens you up wide to privacy violations. Anything you use on the internet can end up in the hands of law enforcement. And certainly any SOCIAL network is, by its very nature, NOT private.

There is no way to be on the internet, and be completely opaque to the larger world at the same time. Zuckerberg is lying to you. So are Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, and Wire. If you're worth it, the US can track you. (Not just the US, several other nations and organizations can as well.)

Your tech savvy buddy who told you that they couldn't find you behind that pseudonym as long as you were using a VPN? Yeah... he's lying to you as well.

Brian Acton? Yep... you guessed it. He's lying to you. If you want privacy, DO NOT USE THESE TECHNOLOGIES. If you must use them, accept and understand that you have no privacy while you are using them. Then behave accordingly while using these technologies.

All that said, while we will never have privacy using the internet in its current form, we can undertake two initiatives simultaneously to ameliorate the situation.

Firstly, the internet has to be rearchitected with privacy as one of the design goals. (This likely can't happen all at once, but bit by bit over time we can get there.)

Secondly, and concurrently, we need to agitate for laws that make the sharing of data between commercial firms explicitly illegal. This won't protect us from the government aggregating our data, but it will make the government's job a little bit more difficult and it will stop commercial entities in their tracks.