There's a simple solution to any problem related to Facebook. Stop using it.
And that is not even enough given the fact that Facebook owns WhatsApp and Instagram, their presence grows ever more ominous given their ubiquity.
> ...Facebook. Stop using it.
Easier said than done, I guess.
Btw, yes it is easy. I have stopped using FB for so long that in order to log back in to delete my account they are asking me to be verified via "friends" (people I haven't worked with or talked to for years).
And the current legal debate and regulations about it are long overdue.
The world where regulations can prevent that would be so creepy dystopian, that it wouldn't even need humans anymore.
Is it dystopian to regulate that sites cannot host and distribute pedophile content for instance ? Regulations are needed, in the internet as much as anywhere else.
Yes, this is exactly dystopian.
You don't need to look to the future. We already have p2p solutions and encryption that if hacked together could serve as some sort of decentralised storage. The public doesn't use it.
Had. Torrent is mostly banned at ISP level.
> The public doesn't use it.
They will if there is no alternative. The public uses email because there was no WhatsApp in 1989.
The public doesn't use it because it hasn't been hacked together and that for all intents and purpose the experience has more friction than what is available today.
One of the first things we teach people is, that once a picture is on the net, it will never be deleted.
And, secondly, nowadays the web is a lot more crowded, all the less technically minded people go online with a very sparse understanding of the web. Early adopters had a different demographic than the current userbase.
The less tech minded usually do what the more tech minded tell them. The problem is we 've lulled people with "security", green lock icons. We all know that all security is temporary, but we also chose to appeal to people's natural need for safety. The point is even the best digital security measure is nowhere near good old physical security.
So, the school photographer comes. It's the usual think where they make pictures, and you can order some copies. This year they only made class photos. They send you some link where you can log in to see a watermarked version of the photo, you can then order a digital copy or a printed copy.
However, they also put a Facebook share link on the page where people can share the class photo with one click. I am sure there are a lot of parents who do not even think about the rights and wishes of other parents and just share the photo.
So, we are in a bad situation where we explicitly disallow people to upload photos of our daughter, but not can people upload pictures anyway against our wishes, companies are actively pushing people to do so.
All the tracking and unwanted uploads of personal information (though friends' address books), photos, etc. without any explicit permission is a disgrace. I hope that the EU keeps hitting these companies with the GDPR until they respect people's privacy. Sure, if you decide to share your life with Google, Facebook, and a countless tracking companies, that's up to you. But this unwanted slurping of every bit of information has to end.
Forbid stalking, dark patterns, lies (aka fraud) and their overall lack of morals & ethics. Facebook will be welcome to adapt and behave like a well-meaning member of society.
There motto could have been to SERVE THE USER. Instead it became FOCUS on the user. They focus their product towards three dark patterns: extracting data from the user, manipulating the user, and addicting the user. For now it is towards the benefit of advertisers which is Relatively harmless in the future scheme of things.
A more benign use could have been connecting users across the world to each other and to other companies for healthy conversations. To be what FRIENDS were meant to always be.
Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend.
So essentially forbid everything that makes them the most amount of revenue from advertising? I don't see that likely to happen.
The problem with Facebook is not exclusive to Facebook Inc. It's a common symptom of advertising-based and similarly nefarious business models used by the richest modern corporations. Investors want their ROIs and optimizing for advertising delivers that easily when the business handles extraordinary amounts of personal information.
There are many ways of breaking out of this corrupt model. Creating new business models not dependent on advertising is a no-brainer, but so is creating tools that enable people to keep control over the data they share online. There's a lot of emphasis on distribution and cryptocurrencies recently, which is great, but we have a long ways to go to make the importance of these systems understandable by the general public, while also making them approachable and easy to use.
Make this about the people. Nobody likes being stalked, tricked nor lied to. Regulation against these behaviours would be welcomed by most people.
This is what I was talking about. I consider surveillance and tracking of any kind a dark pattern, though.
EDIT: with passive updates.
I recently created myself a Pixelfed (a federated instagram, basically) and was pleasantly surprised how my profile has a plain, old RSS feed, so that anyone can "track" me without ever visiting a website (which is something that ActivityPub itself also allows, but AP still forces you to be a part of the "system", so to say).
I'd much prefer that kind of Federated world, but I don't see how we can get there in any other way than spreading awareness about it and basically nagging our friends (at the risk of isolating ourselves) – “I wish I could follow your adventures and thoughts, but I don't want a facebook account”. This of course requires a critical mass for basically each person, and probably a way of automatically updating the locked-in platforms (for each post you push to pixelfed/blog it updates your instagram/facebook) so that the ones who take a step out don't need to leave their locked-in friends behind.
Of all the people who listen to podcasts through some kind of an app, how many of them have created an account anywhere?
On a serious note, all the tools from before Facebook existed still work. If you need Facebook/Twitter alternative consider Mastodon or Diaspora.
I don’t know how it will end, but I’m confident that I’ll keep in touch with the friends that are actually important. Not staying in semi-touch with people I don’t feel the urge to call, send a mail, or invite/travel to is something I look forward to :)
It's not the internet, it's social media. I believe in time history will show it was one of the worst advances of mankind.