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Comment by chatman | Hacker News Reader

Dr. Stallman also reminds us that Facebook is bad. It doesn't respect the users and their freedom against mass surveillance. http://stallman.org/facebook.html

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Stallman's criticisms are accurate, but irrelevant. Real people tend to like and want the service that Facebook offers (frictionless connection to loved ones), and they deliver. Any anti-Facebook sentiment from the FOSS community that is not an attempt to create a free and humane disruption is merely wasted breath (or worse, an in-group shibboleth).

Real people

Yes, because Stallman is fictional. I'm fictional. Anyone who isn't on Facebook doesn't count as a person.

> that is not an attempt to create a free and humane disruption

See https://diasporafoundation.org

By now, it is pretty clear there's no freedom from mass surveillance, at least if you're living in the US and using telephones or the internet. So singling out facebook is useless - for any site, if they have any info on you, assume the government has it, and they don't need court order for it either, and they won't allow the site to tell you about it.

I singled out, and deleted my account from, Facebook because of one of the recent news stories that showed that they actively tried to build profiles of people that their users know who are NOT on Facebook. It's one thing for me to voluntarily hand over information about myself, but it's quite another for Facebook to sneakily try to access information about my contacts.

Does it make any practical difference? I'm not sure. Being totally invisible to surveillance may be next to impossible, but I found that action on the part of Facebook to be needlessly over the top.

Every lock can be cracked, but nevertheless I am locking my house.

The Dr. salutation threw me off, I don't think he's technically a doctor. However he has been awarded a bunch of honorary doctorates.

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